It was their first album with vocalist Ron Rinehart and bassist Mike Gonzalez (who joined just prior to the release of Darkness Descends), and the last to feature guitarist Jim Durkin.

It introduced a more technical and progressive element to the band's music than the raw sound of its predecessors, presenting two instrumentals and several songs lasting more than five minutes.

Leave Scars received a positive-to-mixed review from AllMusic's Eduardo Rivadavia, who gave the album a rating of two-and-a-half out of five.

He noted that, with Leave Scars, Dark Angel "continued to perfect their already quite impressive musical chops, while simultaneously refining their brutal thrashing" and called it "the album which inaugurates their progressive thrash phase, as increasingly complex structures and frequent, unexpected time changes result in numbers of epic proportions."

In the closing in his review, however, Rivadavia wrote, "Ultimately, Leave Scars only fails to score higher marks because Dark Angel forgot to add a final, crucial ingredient to its potent recipe: melody.