Darkthrone's run of black metal albums faltered a little with Total Death. Notable mainly for Fenriz stepping aside to let Nocturno Culto and various guest lyricists write the words to the songs, the album finds Darkthrone sounding tired and a little directionless, churning out yet another set of black metal songs but not quite finding a way to really take their sound forward, as they had with every album since A Blaze In the Northern Sky. Often they will seem to be groping towards a new direction only to apparently think better of it and stop; there's some token efforts towards bringing forth riffs reminiscent of their early death metal work there, a bit of basic rock and roll there, but on the whole things just don't gel on this album the same way they did on the previous ones.