Laibach’s ‘Volk’ turns 20 on 26 October
Slovenian industrial group Laibach released their seventh studio album, “Volk,” on 26 October 2006 through Mute Records. The record turns 20 this year.
Laibach wrote and produced “Volk” with fellow Slovenian act Silence, built around fourteen tracks that each rework a national or pan-national anthem: “Germania” (Germany), “America” (United States), “Anglia” (United Kingdom), “Rossiya” (Russia and the former Soviet Union), “Francia” (France), “Italia” (Italy), “España” (Spain), “Yisra’el” (Israel and Palestine), “Türkiye” (Turkey), “Zhonghuá” (China), “Nippon” (Japan), “Slovania” (the former Yugoslavia and Pan-Slavism), “Vaticanae” (Vatican City) and “NSK,” the anthem of the band’s own fictional Neue Slowenische Kunst state. Vocalist Boris Benko of Silence and a rotating cast of guest singers performed across the tracks, recorded between Ljubljana, London and Hamburg.
About Laibach
Laibach formed in 1980 in the mining town of Trbovlje, in what was then the Socialist Republic of Slovenia within Yugoslavia, taking its name from the German name for Ljubljana. From the start, the group built its identity around iconography that parodied totalitarianism, nationalism and militarism, drawing bans and controversy. In 1984, Laibach co-founded the Neue Slowenische Kunst art collective alongside the IRWIN visual-arts group and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre performance group, a framework the band continues to reference in its own invented NSK state.
Signed to Mute Records, Laibach built a catalogue of genre-reworking albums through the 1980s and 1990s, including “Opus Dei” (1987), “Kapital” (1992) and the religion-themed “Jesus Christ Superstars” (1996), followed by “WAT” in 2003, its 23rd anniversary covered by Side-Line. “Volk” continued that pattern in 2006 with an entire album of national anthems reinterpreted through the band’s martial, neoclassical sound. Laibach has remained active since, most recently with the studio album “Musick” in 2026 and an accompanying European tour. “Volk,” the album that turned the group’s long-standing interest in national symbolism into a single, anthem-by-anthem concept, turns 20 this October.
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