Zeche, Bochum, Germany6th October 2026
Laibach - “Musick Tour” 2026
LAIBACH are a strange entity in the world of music and performance. More an art and performance collective than your everyday Rock group, they saw many wildly different and even contradictory incarnations over the decades. The long-player “Musick”, released in May 2026, is their latest incarnation, and many fans and critics were bewildered by the shamelessly streamlined Pop of the concept album.
As usual it’s best to check out LAIBACH live for the real deal, to understand what it’s all about. So the current leg of the “Musick Tour” was not to be missed, albeit with mingled feelings and the question in mind what to expect.
Founded in the industrial coal-mining town of Trbovlje in 1980 - shortly after the death of Josip Broz Tito - LAIBACH emerged as one of the most provocative and misunderstood artistic forces of the late 20th century. LAIBACH moved from the martial Industrial of their early days to a more straightforward but no less dangerous sound, covering Rock classics such as QUEEN’s ‘One Vision’ which they infamously translated into German as ‘Geburt einer Nation’. LAIBACH reshaped their identity in the 21st century as ever-evolving commentators on global political and social developments.
From the Wagnerian techno of 2003’s ‘WAT’ (acronym for ‘We Are Time’) to their adaptation of the musical ‘The Sound Of Music’, including a performance in North Korea of all places, LAIBACH never indulge in a convenient position of ironic distance, they rather insert themselves fully in the topics they deal with and execute an over-the-top seriousness which is in all its exaggerated and burlesque attitude always multi-layered and never straight in-your face. This is the concept of “Überidentifikation” (overidentification) which already made ‘Geburt einer Nation’ so controversial and ambiguous.
After a number of conceptual reinterpretations, theatrical commissions, and symphonic projects, LAIBACH surprised the music world in May 2026 with ‘Musick’, their first album with original LAIBACH songs in more than a decade. Radically different from the menacing aesthetics of their previous works, the album musically dives head-first into Pop, Dance, EDM and warped Eurodance while conceptually grappling with today’s hyper-digital world of social networks, artificial intelligence, and consumerism in a populist capitalism.
Some might criticize the sound of ‘Musick’ as being too mainstream, but those certainly don’t get the point. LAIBACH never do half-baked things, they go all the way and beyond. Not by resisting but by accelerating everything to an absurd, totalitarian extreme. “Überidentifikation” again. http://www.laibach.org
Music & Performance
“This is not entertainment, this is an interface!” announces a robotic female AI voice before the show starts. Also, that enjoyment is optional and feeling uncomfortable is okay, and addressing the concert attendees as “slaves to the algorithm” whose reactions would be monitored. After the show it dawned on me that this was probably the most honest and most direct statement by LAIBACH in years. They clearly state what is coming for the audience! And pink and magenta are the new black and white, as the lights and the rose-tinted LAIBACH logo on the huge LED backdrop give away.
This LED screen is centre and focus of the new show, apart from stoic vocalist Milan Fras. All the other musicians are relegated to the sides or the very back where they maintain strict physical immobility. Mobility is solely the concern of two young female dancers, Patricija Crnkovič and Daša Resnik, who suddenly rush on stage in the middle of the opener and title track of the current album. The two deliver more smiles on stage in one night than in the previous four decades of LAIBACH shows altogether, and they occasionally also add some backing vocals.
The set of the show is comprised almost exclusively of songs from ‘Musick’ and the yet to be released addendum ‘Encore’ - what an apt title! Very few old songs make it into the set, and only those that actually fit the concept. Most of the old stuff would probably rather feel like a disturbance in this pastel-coloured new embodiment of hyper-Pop LAIBACH. I have to admit that I struggled with the ‘Musick’ album, it features many elements that I do not like about current chart and dance music.
Autotune vocals, K-Pop and cheap EDM hooks? Thanks, but not really my cup of tea. While I appreciated the underlying concept, I still had some doubts before the gig. Nothing prepared me for the sugar-coated, seductive overkill LAIBACH present with their new show! At the actual concert you were quickly immersed in the world the new LAIBACH presented on stage. It was like everything, everywhere, all at once, like a session of doomscrolling through our digital AI-ridden world, accompanied by LAIBACH’s saccharine Pop hooks and generic dance beats.
The LED is certainly the star of the show, without diminishing the efforts of the band, the dancers and Milan Fras, who acts dead-centre as the anchor point of the performance. None of the guest vocalists on the ‘Musick’ album, such as Ghanaian Afro-Pop superstar WIYAALA, are present in person but mere “fly-ins” via video screen. So the Slovenian-Balkan trap / R&B star Senida Hajdarpašić is on screen for the vocoder-laced ‘Love Machine’, a clear nod to KRAFTWERK’s ‘Man Machine’, while fellow Slovenian Indie Rock star Manca Trampuš delivers sugary, bubble-gum backing vocals for ‘Keep It Reel’ and ‘Modern Talking’.
Mina Špiler, longtime former core touring vocalist, makes a surprise appearance on the screen to the delight of many fans. While not an album guest on ‘Musick’, she appears during the live performance of Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Love on the Beat’ and the ‘Spectre’ cut ‘Bossanova’. The line between the people actually on stage and what happened on screen somewhat blurred after a while, also because of the sheer overload of the visual presentation.
There were also short bits and pieces on screen between songs, such as fake press reviews, clearly AI generated street interviews with youngsters praising LAIBACH, an ad break for the LAIBACH merchandise shot in style of the screaming ads which interrupt your TikTok feed, and dance instructions for the crowd to prepare for ‘Allgorhythm’, the current album’s lead single. After that LAIBACH performed ‘Tanz mit Laibach’, arguably their most popular song. But they only played half of the song as it quickly morphed into some sort of Techno medley with elements of LAIBACH classics such as ‘The Whistleblowers’ or ‘Leben heisst Leben’.
Usually LAIBACH have a 15-minute theatre break in the middle of their shows and the screen actually shows a countdown and says “musical intermezzo”. But this time the musicians, minus Milan Fras, stay on stage to perform this medley, which apparently changes slightly from gig to gig and was in fact one of the highlights of the show. Bad luck for anyone who went for a cigarette break!
An unexpected highlight was ‘Singularity’, one of the songs from ‘Musick’ I wasn’t really too keen on because of its babyish melody and cheesy autotune vocals. I should have paid better attention as it is rather a cynical take on the generic randomness of modern music, especially since AI music entered the scene. “Algorithms kill the flame, all tunes sound the same” sings a threefold Donna Marina Mårtensson, longtime collaborator on previous tours, on the screen while the two dancers pull some people from the audience onto the stage to join the dance.
With LAIBACH you never know if this Pop cliché is probably just an examination of how people’s behaviour changes when they are pulled from the anonymity of a crowd into the spotlight. And this moment is a nice synopsis of the ‘Musick’ show: A feverish, gaudy, and deeply unnerving Pop celebration held right on the precipice of cultural obsolescence, sugar-coated but bittersweet below the surface.
We’re at a historical turning point with the rise of artificial intelligence, and soon alien generative systems might outplay, outpace, and outproduce human creativity entirely. AI is ‘Das Göttliche Kind’ (the divine child) we created, and which LAIBACH sing about in the final song of the main set, and as a result LAIBACH say “I’m sick of music”. Hence ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music’, a cover of a WILL-O-BEES song performed in the short encore, is the perfect counter-argument to this.
tl;dr: LAIBACH manage to surprise yet again and regarding show and concept this may be the hottest contender for concert of the year. And I certainly didn’t expect that before the show! The ‘Musick’ tour will continue into 2027, so if you have the chance to see the show you shouldn’t miss it.
Setlist
01. Musick
02. Musick Pt2
03. Fluid Emancipation
04. Love Machine
05. Love on the Beat
06. Resistencia
07. Generationz
08. Keep it Reel
09. #Us
10. Warm up
11. Allgorhythm
12. Medley: Tanz mit Laibach / Laibach Hit Parade
13. Luigi Mangione
14. Modern Talking
15. Bossanova
16. Yes Maybe No
17. Singularity
18. Memorabilia
19. Das göttliche Kind
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20. Make Your Own Kind of Music (The Will-O-Bees cover)
21. Faith no More
22. Musick (Balžalorsky remix)
In the face of the concept of ‘Musick’ it would be most appropriate if this review would be written by AI entirely. But it wasn’t, these are my own thoughts. Make your own kind of reviews!
All Pictures by Daniela Vorndran (http://www.vorndranphotography.com / http://www.facebook.com/blackcatnet)
