🎶 Vanessa Funke
🌎 Gevelsberg, Germany
📀 Requiem 
® Liminal Dread Productions
📅 10/2025

It wasn’t easy to write about “Requiem”. It speaks of loss and loss is no longer an abstract word to me. It has faces, voices, hands that are gone. Maybe that’s why every note of this record cuts deeper than it should. I don’t just listen to it. I bleed with it.

There are records you simply listen to, and there are records that force you to remember. Vanessa Funke’s “Requiem” belongs to the latter. From the very first moment, it stares straight into you and whispers what you’ve been trying to forget: nothing lasts forever.

This is not music that invites you to dance or scream. It leaves you standing alone in the cold, breathing grief. Every track feels like a wound opening slowly… “Solitude”, “Worthless”, “Sorrow”, “Gone”.
There aren’t many words here, only sounds that carry weight. Funke’s voice doesn’t sing, it prays. Or maybe it just breaks.

Listening to it feels like walking through an ancient temple filled with dust and forgotten echoes. The drums pulse like tired hearts trying to keep beating. The guitars don’t build melodies, they dig graves.
And behind everything, a silence… thick, heavy, suffocating.

“Requiem” doesn’t have the gloss of big productions, nor the structural perfection of polished releases. At times, the vocals drown, the repetition drags, the sound falters. But that’s exactly why it feels real: because pain itself is imperfect. Grief doesn’t follow rhythm or harmony. It stumbles, gasps, collapses and somehow keeps going.

Funke isn’t performing here. She’s mourning. And if you stay long enough, you become part of the ritual. There are no climaxes, no catharsis. Just this quiet, strangled breathing that makes you realize something inside you is giving way. And maybe that’s the truest thing an album can do.

In the end, “Gone” fades like a last breath. Not dramatically, it just leaves. And you’re left with the silence staring back at you. That’s when you understand “Requiem” isn’t about death. It’s about what remains. About us, the ones still here.

The Weight of Numbers

If I had to rate it (which I have to) I’d give it a 9/10. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s honest.

There are moments where the production trembles, where the guitars smother the voice, where the rhythm loses itself. Times when you wish the sound would rise, explode, but it doesn’t. It stays low, buried in the ashes. And yet, that’s exactly what makes it powerful. “Requiem” never chases beauty; it hides it inside its flaws.

Its mix feels like old demos that were never meant to be finished and maybe they didn’t need to be. Funke doesn’t capture sound, she captures emotion. Every crack, every distorted passage feels like a tear left unshed.

This isn’t a record for loud speakers. It’s one for the quiet hours, when the shadows are most honest. And somewhere in that murk, a small flame flickers… fragile, but real. So no, it’s not perfect. But it’s one of the truest things you’ll hear this year.

Personal Afterword

I no longer write to explain and rate. I write because, somewhere in this album, I found a piece of myself. It came at a time when I feel exhausted, full of cracks, heavy-hearted, drowning in unfinished thoughts. And yet, music remains the one thing that reminds me I’m still alive.

Funke reminded me that pain isn’t something you overcome, it’s something you carry. And if you’re lucky, you turn it into a song. “Requiem” didn’t comfort me, but it reminded me that there is still room to feel.

And maybe, in the end, that’s what really matters: to keep feeling, to keep listening, to keep going…

★ 9/10
✍🏻 Flower Of Evil aka Athena Kakrida