Laibach - Wir Sind Das Volk (Ein Musical Aus Deutschland) (2LP)

Laibach’s Wir Sind Das Volk feels like a dispatch from the engine room of European history, cut to size for the turntable. Released by Mute in 2022, it grows out of the group’s stage production in Berlin that set Heiner Müller’s words to music. Müller, the gnomic East German playwright of Hamletmaschine and Germania, wrote with a cold fire about states, ruins and the human voice under pressure. Laibach take those texts and give them a body, all drum thud, brass stabs, synth fog and the familiar rumble of Milan Fras countered by Mina Špiler’s glassy poise. It is theatrical, but it hits like a proper album, not a souvenir from the stalls.

What makes it work is the way Laibach lean into Müller’s bite without smoothing it down. The slogan on the tin, Wir sind das Volk, was chanted on streets in 1989, but it also carries centuries of German argument about who gets to claim that word. Laibach know their way around symbols, and they set Müller’s lines with a sense of ritual and threat that suits him. When the drums march, you feel the weight of parades. When the synths bloom into choral pads, you hear the ghost of a cathedral. Špiler often takes the lines that need light and breath, while Fras handles the proclamations. It is a dynamic they have perfected since Spectre and Also Sprach Zarathustra, and it gives the record shape.

The pieces drawn from Hamletmaschine are a highlight. Müller’s fractured monologue has been staged a thousand ways, yet Laibach find a fresh path by resisting the temptation to explode it into noise. Instead, they allow space, letting a single phrase ring out against a sustained chord, then pushing the tension with a snare figure that could belong to an honour guard. Elsewhere, when they turn to texts connected with Germania, the arrangements grow steelier, full of clanking percussion and low brass that recalls their early martial-industrial period. The band have always been experts at scale, shifting from chamber to parade ground with a flick of the wrist, and that sense of size is all over the album.

There is melody too, and even a touch of tenderness. Špiler’s voice can lift a line out of the rubble, which stops the record becoming a monochrome exercise in grit. Laibach understand contrast. They will stack a male choir against a lonely piano, then bring in a procession of drums like a border crossing. On headphones, the sound design is detailed, with reverb settings that place you in imagined rooms, from bunker to theatre. It suits a late-night listen, a glass in hand, lights low.

Context helps. Laibach’s history is a hall of mirrors, from their 1980s provocations to the unlikely Pyongyang concert in 2015. They are forever testing the line between critique and complicity, and that tension is part of the thrill. With Wir Sind Das Volk they are working with material that is already wary of slogans, which keeps the project honest. Müller’s writing resists easy anthems, and Laibach treat it with respect, not reverence. The result feels like dialogue rather than appropriation.

The reception has been solid among critics who follow Laibach’s theatre-facing work, and it is easy to hear why. This is not a singles record, though specific tracks will stick with you, especially the sharper, German-language pieces where the consonants cut. It is an album you play from front to back, letting the sequence tell its own story. If you have Laibach albums on vinyl like Volk or Also Sprach Zarathustra, this sits neatly alongside them, continuing that thread of wrestling with national myths through form and texture.

For those hunting Laibach vinyl, the pressing of Wir Sind Das Volk vinyl carries the weight of the music well, with room for the low end to breathe. In a Melbourne record store it would be one of those sleeves you pull out, feel the heft, and know you are taking home an artefact, not just a playlist. If you buy Laibach records online, this is an easy recommendation, and it turns up readily through shops that specialise in vinyl records Australia wide. It is also a smart gateway for anyone curious about the band’s art-world side without diving straight into obscure live recordings.

Laibach have always been better than their reputation suggests, sharper and funnier and more exacting than the clichés. Wir Sind Das Volk proves it again. It is serious work, but it plays like music first, concept second. Spin it and you get that old Laibach feeling, the sense that history is not just a thing you read, but a room you can walk into and hear, beat by beat.