It was during a midnight drive through the storm-lashed Scottish wilderness in 2022 that frontwoman Agnes Alder decided to turn Cwfen from a synthwave project into a metal one.
“I remember very distinctly, travelling from Glasgow to Fife – a place steeped in witchcraft history – looking out at that great, flat expanse,” she recalls. “At The Stake by Melvins came on the radio, and there was fork lightning around me. I knew then that I wanted to make music that sounded like that. You could almost feel the weight of the horror that had happened in that landscape.”
Fast-forward to 2025, and Cwfen’s deliciously doomy debut, Sorrows, struck the metal scene with a similar kind of thundering blow. At its heart, the album is a powerful lament echoing Scotland’s dark and magical past, one marked by harrowing witch trials and the suppression of female knowledge and power. Its songs are spells cast with the intention to cause change, and free those who still suffer under patriarchy today.
“For me, music feels like the purest form of magic-making, especially in terms of changing a feeling, state, or someone’s opinion on something,” Agnes says. “While we didn’t set out to make inherently political music, I think it’s just by virtue of what we write about. And I don’t make any apologies for that.”
Existing somewhere, as Agnes describes it, “between the threads of a spider web”, Sorrows is a genre-crossing collection of songs that tips its (witch) hat to a wide pool of bands, including Chelsea Wolfe, King Woman, Alcest, Amenra and Nirvana. There are also more esoteric influences, drawn from visionary women such as 12th-century nun Hildegard of Bingen, and from the writings of US speculative fiction icon Ursula K. Le Guin, Australian novelist Hannah Kent and Mexican-American author/psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés.
The seething gothic bluster of Wolfsbane imagines a world ‘cured’ of the violence of men by using poisonous plant magic. Embers, a “very magical song”, ponders queer love in the face of oppression.
“We have a very queer audience,” Agnes says proudly, “and it’s been incredible to see people finding meaning in our music.”
Sorrows was recorded at Deep Storm Studios in the Scottish hinterlands near Strathaven. With Cwfen having a strong reverence for nature, the environment unsurprisingly had an impact on the process.
“There was a wishing well, a three-legged black cat, and the live room overlooked the mist-covered countryside,” Agnes recalls. “We come from a damp, misty, dark, mysterious, achingly beautiful and sometimes quite troubling place. I think the music is very much a product of that.”
Cwfen find themselves deeply touched by the overwhelmingly positive response to Sorrows.
“It’s one of the things I’m most proud of in my entire life, outside of my children,” says Agnes.
Its success has landed them huge support slots with Paradise Lost for 2026, multiple – currently secret – festival bookings, and they’re already planning album number two. Agnes, however, is currently focused on “practising gratitude for what we’ve accomplished right now”, being in the present moment, and, adorably, tending to her new “familiars” – a set of kittens, birthed from a fostered pregnant cat, which she proudly presents in this interview. Witchy, indeed.
Sorrows is out now via New Heavy Sounds.
IN SHORT
Sounds Like: The echo of centuries-old witches, casting incantations into the aether
For Fans Of: Type O Negative, Chelsea Wolfe, King Woman
Listen To: Reliks
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