Warthur Gorgoroth's first to include Gaahl as the full-time vocalist (as opposed to appearing on a single song, as on Destroyer) also saw King ov Hell debuting as the group's bassist. However, the pair did not yet take the lead with it came to songwriting as they would for the next couple of albums; for this one, Infernus remained more or less in charge. What he comes up with is, to be honest, a muddle. There's a combination here of fairly straight-ahead and unsurprising black metal and the occasional failed attempt to get a bit experimental.

For instance, at points the band will attempt to insert a bit of electronic industrial music into the songs, but there's little to no effort made to actually integrate these interludes into the compositions. Likewise, Litani til Satan has Gaahl intone a Baudelaire poem in deep, clean vocals which seem to take more than a little influence from Rammstein as the band jam away in the background, but the musical backing is so repetitive and devoid of ideas that the track becomes mind-numbingly tedious.

On the whole, Incipit Satan is a shaky album which might be enjoyable to Gorgoroth fanatics, but I think most listeners will agree that by this point Infernus' songwriting formula had begun to run out of steam.