Laibach Apply Pop Polish to ‘Musick’

The Slovenian group Laibach have spent over four decades treating popular music as raw material to be twisted, inflated, and spoken over. Their new album Musick pushes that instinct further. They are not covering particular songs this time. They are covering the logic of pop itself, gathering the absurdities of the past decade into something shiny and deliberate.

To pull that off, they handed a handful of tracks to veteran dancepop producer Richard X. The choice is instructive. A younger, stranger producer would have suggested the wrong kind of experiment. Richard X arrives with a sound that is established and radio-legible, which means the target is always clear. The beats, orchestra hits, and Auto-Tune stay exactly where you expect them. The friction comes from Milan Fras, whose deadpan delivery has not changed. He speaks his lines as ever, a low guttural croak that makes even the most generic phrases sound like a verdict.

The album opens with three Richard X productions, and the strongest is “Allgorhythm.” It nods openly to Pet Shop Boys, building from an allusion to their cover of the Village People’s “Go West.” Hearing Fras deliver a line about how much talking happens when the band drops a song lands as genuinely funny, but the four-on-the-floor insistence behind him is real. These tracks work as electro-flavored dancepop on their own terms. That is part of the point.

Elsewhere, the subversion is less subtle. The title track begins with a celebration of music as the key, the answer, the food of love, before Fras stops and declares himself sick of it. “Love Machine” repurposes Kraftwerk’s silhouette and slowly replaces the title phrase with something less affectionate. The moves are broad, but the album does not pretend otherwise. Musick is a pop record built by people who know exactly what they find exhausting about pop, and they hired the right producer to make that exhaustion sound a little too familiar.