In March 2025, U.S. post-punk / gothic rock band The Funeral March from Rockford, Illinois, commemorated the life and legacy of their late founder and bandleader, Joe Whiteaker, with their final release, It All Falls Apart. Tragically, Joe lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in May 2024, shortly after completing what would be the band’s final studio recordings, with producer William Faith.
On Wednesday, 16 April 2025, the band released the new video for ‘Stars at Night’: the second of two video-singles from It All Falls Apart, filmed shortly before Joe passed away last year, which premiered exclusively with Side-Line Magazine. Already a DJ and fan favourite from It All Falls Apart, the high-octane goth-rock barn burner ‘Stars at Night’ also features guest vocals from Ria Aursjoen of Octavian Winters and AURSJ?EN, who said:
“In the fall of 2023, I got a call from William Faith asking whether I might be interested in lending vocals to a project he was working with… as soon as William sent me the song, I was completely taken with it! I asked William what the band was looking for from me; he was reluctant to provide me with specific direction and told me to follow my own instincts. I sent a couple versions, getting feedback from Joe and William along the way, and ended up laying in countermelodic backing vocals in the choruses that I felt would really bring out the hook and enhance Joe’s lead vocal, as well as an ethereal section in the bridge.”
‘Stars at Night’ follows on from the title track and lead video-single, ‘It All Falls Apart’, which premiered on 10 March 2025, via Post-punk.com. Both videos were produced and directed by The Funeral March, shot by Lumbra Productions, and edited by Scott Fedor. Both videos also star Ty Yaeger Jr. as the protagonist, alongside The Funeral March, while for ‘Stars at Night’, Ria Aursjoen was filmed by David Kruschke.
Bassist Darius McCaskey, who took on the task of bringing Joe Whiteaker and The Funeral March’s final musical statement to release, says:
“The videos were both shot entirely in Rockford, Illinois, because Joe’s health prevented him from traveling to Chicago where we’d initially planned on filming… Ria’s shots in ‘Stars at Night’ were filmed in San Jose, California, while Octavian Winters were filming a music video of their own… These music videos are the last time Joe would be captured on film.”
Ria Aursjoen continues:
“…in February of 2024, Octavian Winters was shooting our video for ‘Nebula’… and Joe reached out to ask whether I might be able to provide some footage for the video for ‘Stars at Night’. The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous. We only had one day for the Octavian Winters shoot, but the director/cinematographer David Kruschke and I both thought we would have enough time afterwards to capture some footage for ‘Stars at Night’. We shot everything at the beautiful gardens around the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose… I am so very honored to have been apart of such a great song, as well as the video.”
Watch ‘Stars at Night’ by The Funeral March on YouTube
Joe Whiteaker was incredibly proud of the recordings for It All Falls Apart, and was able to hear the final mixes before he passed away. Darius McCaskey remembers Joe as “an incredibly supportive guy” who had fostered Darius’s own love of dark alternative music, and who was a proactive supporter of the local goth, post-punk and darkwave scenes between Rockford and Chicago over several decades:
“I wasn’t much into post-punk or goth rock before I met him, but I quickly became a fan of The Funeral March. What Joe and company were doing spoke to me in a way other genre bands didn’t. That I got to join the band and participate in creating some fantastic songs is a real gift, one I’ll always cherish.”
“Before I joined FM, I was thinking about starting a darkwave solo project. Joe gave me my first MIDI controller and studio monitors and pushed me to make that project happen. He’d organized and DJ’d goth/industrial nights in our hometown literally decades. He was all about trying to create a scene and lift up his fellow artists. Beyond The Funeral March of the Marionettes, that may be his greatest musical legacy – all the other bands and DJs he helped nurture over the years.”
“Most importantly, Joe was my friend. We hung out a ton outside the band context. We gamed together, went to shows together, and worked together for many years. He worked hard on his stage persona, but at heart, he was a big goofball and nerd. I miss the hell out of him.”
(Xen Photography)
The Funeral March of the Marionettes – more often simply ‘The Funeral March’ –originated in Rockford, Illinois in 1987, drawing inspiration from seminal English acts like Bowie, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and Joy Division. The band’s name, meanwhile, was a nod to Charles Gounod’s ‘Funeral March of a Marionette’; best known as the theme music for TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents. During this first phase of the band’s career, The Funeral March was active from their first gig in August 1987, until the mid-1990s, as Whiteaker later explained:
“I looked up, and I was the only original member left, and after many years of fits and starts, when it all fell apart again, I decided it was time to leave it to slumber in its crypt… dreaming the blood red dreams of madness.”
Intermittently reactivated during the early 2000s, another long hiatus followed from 2007. Finally, in 2017, Joe felt that the band’s thirtieth anniversary was the right time to resurrect the project in earnest, and released their long overdue debut, The Raven EP: a remastered collection of unearthed recordings from the band’s early years. Revitalized by a new cast of revolving members, The Funeral March would go on to record and release a string of new EPs: Resurgence (2018), Solace (2020), Flood (2021), and the widely praised Persephone (2023) – with several standalone singles bridging the gaps between them – before entering the studio in 2023 to record what would become their final release, It All Falls Apart.
While there have been many incarnations of the lineup over the years, Whiteaker was joined in The Funeral March by guitarist Wayne Thiele in 2020, and bassist Darius McCaskey in 2021. This trio recorded It All Falls Apart together with producer William Faith at 13 Studio in Chicago. The band is also joined on the album by guest contributors Ria Aursjoen of Octavian Winters and AURSJ?EN on additional vocals; Rob Hyman of [melter] on drums; and Renard Platine on Bass VI. In the final live version of the group, meanwhile, Joe and Darius were joined by guitarist Jeff Goins, and drummer Joel DeLuna. Rounding the recordings out to the band’s first album-length release, It All Falls Apart also features remixes from Tweaker, BELLHEAD, and The Joy Thieves
It All Falls Apart is out now as a download from Bandcamp, and streaming from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and all major digital music outlets.
Joe Whiteaker is survived by a wife and two children, with all proceeds from the release of It All Falls Apart going directly to support the family.
Find The Funeral March on:
Bandcamp – Spotify – Apple Music – Facebook – Instagram