LAIBACH - Musick

In a world of the seven notes saturated with releases (often superfluous), where artificial intelligence is increasingly creeping into previously unthinkable corners, a title like "Musick" becomes a manifesto, not just a provocation (being sick of music is the inevitable pun at play).

Laibach, always sharp-eyed observers of the world around them, have seized the moment to shape an album that probably shouldn't be taken too seriously (and this is, to put it mildly, a crucial point). Pure satire, or simply, after almost fifty years of career, a way of having fun (watching Milan Fras in lipstick in "Fluid Emancipation" – whose video was also shot amid the brutalist architecture of Rozzol Melara in Trieste – is priceless).

The Slovenian collective has never sat still, moving from the symphonic, martial industrial of their beginnings to electronics in its most varied forms (experimental and otherwise). Still, no one could have expected such a paradoxical step forward, with scattered nods to J-pop, K-pop and Nineties eurodance. A conceptually unassailable recipe (the black humour this time comes wrapped like a bag of candy), yet fairly weak from a strictly artistic standpoint.

The first single "Allgorhythm" works (another unmistakable pun), because the compelling dialogue between Milan Fras and guest Wiyaala manages to generate something disorienting, poised between dance-pop and old industrial legacies. Nothing to do with the EBM hammer of the famous "Tanz Mit Laibach" (here the choice of sounds is deliberately commercial), but live it could well become a future staple worth keeping an eye on. The rest, though, sounds almost like a parody of the times we live in, between the overuse of autotune ("Resistencia") and a mood far too happy to leave a mark (as in the case of "Singularity"). The question is: who's going to buy the album after listening to these tracks?

The truth is that "Musick" is not a joke at all, even though all the ingredients are there to make us think otherwise. From this out-of-control carousel, what survives are "Love Machine", "Luigi Mangione" (the country arrangements and old-school choruses remind us of what these Slovenians are still capable of) and the breakbeat hints of "Yes Maybe No", the latter radio-friendly to its core thanks to the fine interplay between the electronic backbone and the female vocals of Donna Marina Måartensson.

Sure, Laibach can get away with anything, but this time it's fair to say they bit off more than they could chew. Also because they've crossed a threshold light years away from their razor-sharp musical sensibility: there, they've lost themselves, in a world that isn't theirs.

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08/05/2026