Artist: Voyna
Title: Monsters
Genre: Post Punk / Dark Wave
Release Date: 28th November 2025
Label: Aenaos Records
Album Review
With ‘Wrong Face’, the first single released earlier in November, VOYNA - the side project of GOLDEN APES frontman Peer Lebrecht - offered a tantalising glimpse of what was to come. The track, elegant and unpretentious, pairs a faultless Post-Punk pulse with crystalline guitars and that unmistakable voice - deep, resonant, and poetic.
Its brilliance lies in the contrast: the taut, bass-driven verses giving way to a chorus that feels weightless, luminous, and quietly melancholic. It’s that rare balance between melancholy and grace - the sense of both dancing and drifting, perfectly suspended between light and shadow.
The full album, ‘Monsters’, expands this atmosphere into a rich and immersive soundscape. What began in 2020 as an introspective side project has now become a complete creative universe, one defined by elegance, restraint, and emotional precision. Lebrecht’s voice remains the gravitational centre, vibrating somewhere between longing and lucidity, while the compositions move with architectural discipline and painterly care.
The lyrics unfold like fragments of an inner monologue: elliptical, questioning, often circling the limits of perception and connection. Across the album, there is a persistent sense of searching: for meaning, for self, for a point of stillness in the flux. Phrases repeat as if trapped in a cycle of memory; refrains turn inward until they dissolve into atmosphere. The “monsters” of the title seem fewer external demons than shadows of the self - embodiments of fear, loss, and the quiet violence of remembering.
‘Calcium Well’ opens the album with a tone of confusion and reverence, its imagery suspended between decay and beauty - an invocation to what lies beneath the surface. ‘Waters’ feels like an act of purification: surrendering to movement, trusting the current even when the destination is unclear. In ‘All Your Ways’, defiance becomes ritual - a song about setting boundaries between love and survival. ‘Milk’, one of the most intimate pieces, merges tenderness and pain in a vision of renewal, falling and rising like language learning to breathe again.
‘Monsters’, the title track, confronts the ghosts directly. There is no cathartic outburst, only quiet recognition, that what haunts us may also be what keeps us alive. In that moment, the record feels less like an act of exorcism and more like acceptance: of imperfection, of history, of the luminous melancholy that defines Lebrecht’s writing.
The beauty of ‘Monsters’ lies in its restraint. Each sonic layer, however minimal, adds depth and dimension. Tracks like ‘Days of Light’ rise with solemn, almost hymn-like power, while ‘Midnight Sun’ captures both exhaustion and awakening, glowing with kinetic intensity. ‘Mountains’ resonates with grandeur, echoing reverence and reconciliation, and the closing ‘White’ dissolves into something dreamlike - the silence after confession.
Production by Thommy Hein enhances that duality: polished but never sterile, intimate yet expansive, like candlelight flickering against glass. Every tone feels deliberate, every silence meaningful.
‘Monsters’ is an album about the act of becoming - learning to live among ruins, finding coherence in uncertainty, and beauty in fracture. Lebrecht doesn’t write songs in the traditional sense; he composes states of being. His words and sounds coexist like thought and breath, fragile but entirely alive.
VOYNA has grown beyond its origins. It is now a distinct voice in the dark wave and post-punk landscape - articulate, understated, and profoundly human. ‘Monsters’ doesn’t ask for attention; it earns it. And in doing so, it reminds us that melancholy, when shaped with care, can be the purest form of grace.
Tracklist
01. Calcium Well
02. Wrong Face
03. Waters
04. All Your Ways
05. Milk
06. Monsters
07. Days of Light
08. Midnight Sun
09. Mountains
10. White
Line-up
Peer Lebrecht - Music, Words, Synths, Programming
Thommy Hein - Guitars, Mixing & Mastering
Maximilian Hennig - Guitars
Christian Lebrecht - Bass
Websites
https://voyna-official.bandcamp.com / https://www.facebook.com/voynaofficial
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 9
Sound: 9
Total: 9 / 10
