Today Laibach has shared the latest track from their forthcoming album, Alamut, which will be out on double vinyl, double CD box set and digitally through Mute on May 9, 2025. The new album is presented in partnership with A/POLITICAL, which is composed in collaboration with Iranian composers Idin Samimi Mofakham and Nima A. Rowshan.

Opening with a 60-piece accordion orchestra, “War”’ is the sixth movement in the Slovenian collective’s innovative symphonic work. The music is very beautiful by how the accordion orchestra shakes the background before the elegant music that matches the seriousness of the song’s theme.

Alamut takes inspiration from the 1938 book of the same name, a retelling of a story from eleventh century Persia by Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol. The book, about martyrdom and the Cult of Personalities, went on to inspire the video game series Assassin’s Creed, as well as artists such as Umberto Eco, Hawkwind and William S. Burroughs, who referenced the work in Naked Lunch, Nova Express  and The Red Night Trilogy.

The book’s central character is Hassan-i Sabbāh, the charismatic religious and political leader of the Nizari Ismailis who founded the mysterious military formation known as the Assassins. Hassan-i Sabbāh was a self-proclaimed prophet who led a holy war against the Seljuk Empire from his eyrie, the castle of Alamut. Bartol’s novel that is known for its maxim: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” which examines the mechanisms of propaganda at a time when the author was witnessing, first hand, the rise of Fascism in Trieste Italy.