Laibach

Laibach is an industrial pop group that started in Trbovlje, Slovenia, in 1980. Their name is taken from the German name for Slovenia's capital Ljubljana, and this reference to World War II occupation was the first of many provocative and ambiguous statements in their long and chameleonic career. Laibach were founding members of the art movement NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst — "New Slovenian Art") and are one of the few musical groups able to claim real influence on the history of their home country.

Laibach are best known for their inventive cover versions of pop songs which have been rerendered in such a way as to reveal formerly hidden or unnoticed messages, often commenting on social and political totalitarianism or rock stardom's own forms of dictatorship. This was done most successfully on OPUS DEI especially on their version of One Vision. Named Geburt Einer Nation after D. W. Griffith's classic film The Birth of a Nation, Queen's lyrics are sung in German to a strident military beat. All of a sudden lines like “one flesh, one blood, one true religion” start sounding suspiciously familiar...

However, the bulk of Laibach's output is their own work. Their own early experiments with totalitarian ambiguity led to their being outlawed in then-Communist Yugoslavia; their name was made illegal so the band resorted to using their black-cross emblem on posters instead. To this day their work deals with similar ideas but frequently Laibach references their own legendary status and tongue-in-cheekly play with the kinds of in-jokes a band accrues in over 40 years of work.

Laibach's musical style has varied a lot over the years. They started as avant-garde industrial musicians, producing what could best be described as ambient noise but soon discovered the joys of the martial rhythm. Having produced a couple of albums of heavy martial industrial music, they began to expand sonically. Following the collapse of Yugoslavia their difficult but rewarding album KAPITAL included hip-hop influences among many others and NATO borrowed from techno while keeping the bombastic atmosphere. The next offering JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTARS came after quite a hiatus and it may have shocked a lot of people with its balls-out metal guitar riffs. The 2003 album WAT returns to a more electronic sound; working with techno producer Umek has produced a slightly odd album of electro beats.

VOLK, was released on October 20, 2006 and was preceded by the single Anglia. The album contains 14 songs composed and produced together with Silence, inspired by national anthems.

In 2008 Laibach released LAIBACHKUNSTDERFUGE. This album is the Laibachian interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach's work The Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge). The majority of the material has been created already in 2006 and premiered the same year on June the 1st at the Bachfest festival in Leipzig.

The band has subsequently released a number of very different albums, the closest to pop being SPECTRE, released in 2014, as well as music for the sci-fi black comedy Iron Sky and its sequel Iron Sky - The Coming Race, and music for the theater projects ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA (2017) and WIR SIND DAS VOLK (2022).

In 2015, Laibach shocked the world with a concert in the North Korean capital Pyongyang, where they performed their remake of the songs from the film musical The Sound of Music. These tracks were also released on the band's eponymous album in 2018.

The band's last original album was released in early 2023, titled 'Sketches of the Red Districts'. With this album, the group returned thematically and formally to their beginnings, producing an album in a contemporary industrial genre. More recently, Laibach has also started to re-release his classic works, the first of which was the famous NOVA AKROPOLA album, which originally saw the light of day in 1986.