Funus plunges into the darkness with the immense new album ‘Dreamless Water’

There’s something wonderfully overwhelming about the world Funus creates on ‘Dreamless Water’. After nearly two decades of shaping the project, Dutch multi-instrumentalist Ruben Vermeulen sounds more assured than ever here, delivering a record that dives headfirst into the shadowier corners of shoegaze and post-metal while emerging with some of his most absorbing material to date.

From the opening title track, ‘Dreamless Water’ immediately establishes its enormous sense of scale. Guitars arrive in great rolling waves, vocals seem to drift from somewhere deep inside the mix, and every layer feels soaked in atmosphere. It carries the weight and intensity associated with post-metal, but there’s also that wonderfully blurred shoegaze quality running through the record, where melody, distortion and ambience become almost impossible to separate.

That combination makes songs such as ‘Still Circling Downwards’ and ‘Between Futures and Shadows’ particularly compelling. Both feel cavernous and deeply emotional, moving between moments of restraint and towering crescendos with remarkable confidence. ‘Caged Liberty’ pushes that heaviness even further, while ‘Hum of Nothing’ becomes one of the album’s great monoliths, stretching towards eight minutes as Funus gradually builds an imposing, almost hypnotic wall of sound.

Yet ‘Dreamless Water’ is far more than an exercise in sheer volume. Some of its most affecting moments arrive when he allows the darkness to breathe. ‘Neon Loneliness’ creates a pocket of eerie stillness, while ‘Fractured Calm’ feels exactly as its title suggests: delicate on the surface, but forever threatening to break apart underneath.

By the time ‘Across the Bridge of Echoes’ brings everything to a close, Funus has constructed something that feels like entering an entirely separate environment. The album is heavy, haunting and intensely immersive, yet there’s a real beauty buried beneath all that distortion.

That attention to atmosphere extends to its physical presentation too. ‘Dreamless Water’ is available as a 12″ vinyl release, including black-blue transparent marble and black variants, alongside a six-panel digipack CD edition. For a record this tactile and carefully realised, those formats feel especially fitting, giving listeners something physical to accompany its vast sonic world.

With this new offering, Funus has delivered a striking meeting point between shoegaze haze and post-metal enormity. Dark, expansive and genuinely transportive, it is definitely one of the project’s strongest statements yet.