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I'm honestly surprised that no one here has covered this one yet. Dark Angel were riding high after Darkness Descends, an album that rivaled Reign in Blood that year with a dark, crushing approach that made them a household name in underground Thrash to this day. Their third album, Leave Scars, was met with some trepidation from long-time fans, mostly due to the replacement of vocalist Don Doty for Ron Rinehart, but while he introduced some growing pains on this release, that doesn't make it any less of a classic in my eyes.

Leave Scars is pretty much everything you would expect from Dark Angel at this point. It was as dark, brutal, and heavy as anything the band had done up to that point, only with Ron they could actually stretch their sound a little bit more, especially with their impressive cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" that really let Ron show off what he could do. But really, every song on here is everything I could ask out of a Dark Angel album, even the brief instrumentals "Cauterization" and "Worms," though I'd like to highlight both "No One Answers" and "Older Than Time Itself" as some of the very best songs they ever did.

This doesn't always get the same love as Darkness Descends, but I'd call it about on par with it, along with being a brilliant entrance for Ron to make. However you measure it, Leave Scars is a Dark Angel album through and through, making it an essential part of any Thrash fan's collection.