Scratch the Surface is the third studio album by American hardcore punk band Sick of It All, released on October 18, 1994, by East West Records.

Despite failing to break Sick of It All into the mainstream, it helped expose hardcore to a wider audience whilst expanding the band's fanbase, especially in Europe.

[3] Setari said that when drummer Armand Majidi informed him of Cipriano's departure and asked him to join during Agnostic Front's final tour, "I just jumped in, no two ways about it, I was the guy.

[10] Lou believed that accusations of the band selling out following its signing with East West "unconsciously [...] pushed [them] toward a darker sound",[4] stating in a 2011 interview with Terrorizer: Before we'd even started writing, even our friends were like, 'oh, you guys are gonna have to come out witha big commercial record now' and we're like 'what are you talking about?'

[8]Sick of It All wrote Scratch the Surface in four months,[11] rehearsing together six days a week in an open loft on Canal Street, Chinatown, which they shared with Rollins Band.

[12] Returning from its third tour of Europe and performances at festival shows, Majidi said that going into writing, the band "were pretty gung ho on how to make the most of the opportunity unfolding before [them]".

[14] Sick of It All recorded Scratch the Surface at Normandy Sound in Rhode Island with engineer Tom Soares, whom had worked on all of the band's album's up to that point.

[16] Although Sick of It All were happy with their performances,[17] the band were disappointed with Soares' "slick" and "clean" mixes of the album,[16] which made them sound "like 80's hair metal".

[4] "Goatless" was inspired by the media controversy surrounding Sick of It All following the 1992 Bard College at Simon's Rock shooting, due to perpetrator Wayne Lo wearing one of the band's t-shirts.

[23] Lou said the song was "written from the point of view of authority figures that contribute to or ignore this kind of problem, but don't want to deal with it when it blows up in their faces.

[28] For the album cover, Sick of It All hired a photographer to carve the band's dragon logo into a block of wood before setting it aflame with lighter fluid and taking pictures of the whole process.

[38] Korn began to overshadow Sick of It All in popularity and media coverage during the tour, which Lou attributed to differences in label support and finances.

[21] In his perfect-score review for Kerrang!, Steffan Chirazi called it a "classic album" that "gives you nothing other than energy, entertainment and exciting, shifting volleys of aural aggro.

[50] AllMusic critic John Franck selected "Step Down" as "Scratch the Surface" as the album's highlights, describing both tracks as "incredible band anthems".

[42] Less favourably, The Hartford Courant criticized the album's songs as "unrelentingly samey",[52] whilst Clark Collis of Select described it as "[revolving] around incomprehensible, shouting, tuneless thrashings.

"[51] In The Trouser Press Guide to '90s Rock (1997), Ira Robbins described Scratch the Surface as "a blast of unreconstructed hardcore in a time and a place where such a thing was once impossible to imagine".

"[47] In a 2006 retrospective for Rock Sound, Alexander Kelham called the album the "high point of [Sick of it All]'s career and the ultimate silencer to those who doubted the integrity" of the band following their signing to East West.

in 2011, similarly commented that it "proved that hardcore bands could poke their heads up above the parapet of the toilet circuit without selling out or diluting their sound one bit.

[57] In an 1997 interview with Metal Hammer UK, Lou Koller said that the album had sold 250,000 copies worldwide; journalist Ian Winwood described its sales figures as "respectable, considering Sick of It All are nowhere near as accesible as Green Day or Rancid.

[61] The band parted ways with the label following the release of its fourth album Built to Last (1997), which Mörat of Terrorizer considered representative of the limited "commercial viability of hardcore".

[63] In 2014, Stephen Hill of Metal Hammer said that the album had a lasting impact on hardcore, helping popularise the genre and leading it to its eventual mainstream acceptance.

[66] Musicians including Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, Chad Gilbert of New Found Glory, and Frank Turner have credited Scratch the Surface with introducing them to hardcore music.

[18] Al Barr of Dropkick Murphys and Ben Koller of Converge and Mutoid Man both consider Scratch the Surface to be one of the best hardcore albums of all time.

[74] The band received several festival offers to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Scratch the Surface in 2024,[75] and were due to perform a set dedicated to the album at Wacken Open Air in August of that year,[76] which was cancelled following Lou's cancer diagnosis in June.