Ruben Vermeulen has been working under the name Funus since 2006, and in that time he has done something quietly remarkable: he has stayed alone. Every vocal, every guitar line, every synthesizer pad, every bass note and drum hit on ‘Dreamless Water’ comes from him. He wrote, arranged, and produced the album in his own studio in the Netherlands between 2023 and 2025, and Ivo at Statinski Mastering gave it a final polish that December. No guest list, no rotating cast. Just one man, a long stretch of years, and a lot of heavy feeling that needed somewhere to go.
The loneliness permeates the writing and therefore lives in the recording. Shoegaze, doom, and post-metal have always leaned toward the slow and immense, and here Vermeulen lets them flow into one another. No silos. Close to the bone, every minute. Intimate is the word he uses for it, and the word fits. It never performs sadness for an audience. It simply sits with it.
Almost immediately, “Dreamless Water” sinks. Guitar and synth close overhead like black water, and there is no thrashing, no sound of entry. Even the title is right: sleep so deep that nothing stays behind in the morning. “Still Circling Downwards” extends the idea, and its title captures the album’s central motion better than I could: a slow spiral, a descent that has stopped being frightening and become familiar. Vermeulen’s vocals sit low and blurred in the mix, a voice heard from another room, and the drumming has the heavy patience of someone who has learned there’s no use rushing.
“Between Futures and Shadows” is a little shorter, and it is where I began to hear how carefully Vermeulen layers his sound. Distortion and shimmer pull against each other, neither winning, and the song hangs in a state of suspended waiting that anyone who has lain awake at three in the morning will recognize. Then comes “Caged Liberty,” whose paradox of a title sounds like an argument one has with oneself. I found it among the heaviest passages on the record, a bruised, grinding piece that seems to push against its own walls.
Nearly eight minutes long, “Hum of Nothing” is part joke, part admission, and the title holds up. Nothing does have a sound, as it happens. A low drone. Pressure behind the ears. The faint hum of a house once everyone’s asleep. Vermeulen stretches the piece wide, the guitars swelling and draining away like tides, and I lost track of listening altogether. All that remained was an empty room, and the odd discovery of how large it was.
The record’s second half pivots with real craft. “Neon Loneliness” runs under three minutes, a quick, bright smear of color against all that dark, and the title brings to mind a lit sign above an empty street. “Fractured Calm” follows, and I admire the contradiction in its name, because it is exactly the emotional state the album keeps visiting: a stillness that has cracks running through it. Then “Where the Heart Sleeps” arrives as a brief interlude of barely over a minute, and I found it startlingly tender. After so much weight, it feels like a hand set gently on the shoulder. It’s the shortest piece here and perhaps the most affecting, precisely because it asks for so little. The finale, “Across the Bridge of Echoes,” runs more than six minutes and rewards the patience the whole album has asked for. It sounds like crossing something, a threshold or a long span, with the memories of everything behind still ringing faintly in the air. It doesn’t resolve so much as release.
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