Since their inception in 1980, Laibach have been provocative. A Slovenian art-rock collective, they have frequently sparked controversy with their readiness to use Nazi iconography and totalitarian symbolism in performances that veer from the disturbing to the hilarious.

Previous projects have included deadpan hardcore industrial covers of the lighter moments of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, plus 1994's Nato, which was scathing about that organisation's powerlessness in the Balkans war. Their new record, Volk, consists of Wagnerian covers of various national anthems.

Laibach "cover" a song in the way a steamroller "covers" a stretch of Tarmac. Flanked by militaristic drummers, vocalist Milan Fras growls portentous lyrics as if he were Fozzie Bear with a sore head. In his black, flowing headgear, he resembles a pissed-off Desert Rat.

The new album takes pot shots at patriotism and cultural imperialism. Fras's guttural whisper joyously subverts the national anthems' specious jingoism, dripping with sarcasm as he dismantles the Star-Spangled Banner and showing equal disdain for dear old Blighty: "God save your precious Queen/ God save you all".

Many anthems are reduced to a bombastic throb of hardcore electronica. La Marseillaise is bastardised to reference current ethnic unrest in Parisian banlieus, while the Turkish anthem finds Fras bawling "Atatürk!" over a jackhammer slab of Teutonic techno.

The whole thrilling, preposterous exercise is an arch situationist prank, and were Fras's po-faced mask to slip, the joke would lose its singular currency. But Laibach have not cracked a smile in 25 years. Tremendous.