INTERVIEW: A Symposium with Cwfen - Woad and White Wine with Glasgow’s Righteous Occultists

It has been tough figuring out how to write up Cwfen. They can’t be defined through simplistic means, nor do they fit snugly into one of the thousands of genres thought up by well-to-dos online. No, Cwfen are an entirely different beast. From cloudy Glasgow they came, but now, within a mere two years of existence, they stretch their long, blackened hand over the British isles and beyond -  touring with the likes of Faetooth and Castle Rat in 2025. It’s quite rare to see a band pick up so much hype in so short a time, but one passing glance at their stage setup is enough to reveal their secret.

It’s haunting.

There’s a dryad on stage covered in thorns and woad screaming over a riff that sounds as if Crowbar and Cocteau Twins made the beast with two backs. In fact, that was a lot of people’s introduction to Cwfen - it was certainly mine. An Instagram reel of a performance of their song ‘Penance’ got a lot of people asking when they would come down to their neck of the woods to do the same. Soon after, they featured in some bonafide metal publications and secured a broad touring schedule for the rest of the year. With their new album Sorrows having been released to great acclaim, things are looking up for the Glaswegian quartet.

And now they’re on my computer screen sipping on white wine and petting their fabulously shaggy cats. Before me is their songbird; Agnes Alder, already a striking looking lady with her doe eyes and raven hair. On-stage she transforms into a weird sister, resplendent with darkened war-paint upon a misty stage. Beside her is Guy De Nuit, her partner-in-crime and the axe-wielder with his long, flowing hair draped over his shoulders as he rocks a Jesus Lizard shirt. Live he shares co-vocal duties and conjures their crushingly heavy atmosphere. Over two hours we shoot the breeze across the digital chasm, many things are discussed: women’s rights, DEVO, Glasgow, and of course, just who the hell are Cwfen?

“I think the genesis of Cwfen and this record,” Agnes muses, still mulling over her wine glass, “comes from the fact that we're all very broad listeners, and we all like a lot of stuff from jazz pop, classical music, etc.” Cwfen started as a darkwave project back in 2023. No grand plan, no thirst for clout. Just some friends making eerie, beautiful noise. “We didn’t set out with any ambitions for this band” Agnes shrugs, Guy adds that “we’ve all had our young, trendy efforts already. We just wanted to make music with people we liked. We thought, ‘well, let's just make a band,’ a group of friends to play a show. It wasn’t an attempt to get a foothold in the record industry. It wasn't an attempt to really do much of anything other than make music.” The irony, of course, is that by not trying, they accidentally became one of the most compelling heavy acts around. Go figure.

“We didn’t set out to sound like anything,” Agnes insists. I ask them about their influences for Cwfen and beyond and, well, that turned out to be a shotgun shell of a question. Many, many names, some quite unlike one another, are thrown around: 11th century nun Hildegard of Bingen, avant-garde artist Diamanda Galás, Georgian polyphony in general, artists like Alcest, Amenra, Steve Albini, Charli XCX, DEVO, and Queen.

“Myself and our bass player are both big Queen fans” says Guy, “Their initial fervour to create economical but impactful music… There’s not allowed to be any dead space. There doesn't need to be eight bars of just rhythm chords in order to kind of get to this ability, nothing's fucking happening!” He exclaims with glee.

One thing is abundantly clear now, they wear their influences on their sleeve but not one inch of them feels shackled by it, impressively managing all of this without any of them overbearing upon the music. Part of it is down to the lo-fi nature of some of the recordings and the mixture of soft and harsh vocals. Agnes howls like a wolf to the moon. Her voice rings in a raw style that can’t help but sound oblique. I ask her if it’s safe to do that without shredding her throat into mincemeat. “I'm gonna say something that's probably gonna bite me in the ass,” she retorts; “I've never once lost my voice singing,” she audibly knocks on some wood, “it’s not happened.”

She then elaborates on how she got her unique singing style. “I grew up singing and in school choirs I was taught the importance of diaphragmatic breathing and how to do it safely. So I read a lot, not only vocal theory stuff, but like anatomy, physiology, all of that kind of stuff. Nobody ever talks about the endorphin rush of primal screaming therapy. It's for me, I wanted to do it, and I wanted to do it well and with conviction and be able to almost have a volume knob on it,” apparently her music teacher at school thought her voice was too ‘wilful’ to be in the choir. “I was good at singing. I was a powerful singer, but because I had a low register, it didn't fit within the types of things they wanted you to sing at school.” I tell her that’s what they told Shakira, she chuckles. “I've had this reflection since Cwfen started, that actually my voice was meant for metal.”

They go on to talk me through some of the songs featured on the new record. “Embers’ came from reading this amazing Hannah Kent book called ‘Devotions’, it’s story about two Lutheran girls who fall in love… And the consequences are enormous. ‘Embers’ feels important for me as a queer woman, I’ve not experienced the oppression that was in the books I’ve read, but I definitely feel like that's an important telling of history that I some way have a connection to. It's definitely very cathartic.” She picks up her enormous cat, Zelda, and continues. “The other one, I think for me, is ‘Wolfsbane’. I've been a feminist my whole life. But this came from a period of righteous female anger at the way that society is sliding backwards in terms of people's rights. When I'm singing these songs, I feel 10 times bigger. It's such a strange thing. I feel like I'm on the edge of breaking down when I’m singing them. And if you watch us perform live you'll see me close my eyes, because otherwise I'm gonna cry.”

I ask Guy to elaborate on the other songs and what they mean to him. “I'll stick with ‘Rite’, which [at the time hadn’t] been released yet,” he says. The name originally was a bit of a pun. It used to be ‘Rite to Die’ as in spell or incantation. It’s still the refrain of the chorus.” He looks pensive for a moment. “It's quite a political number… It's about self-determination and not letting people be put down, not believing in the wrong things, and sticking up for your friends, neighbours and family. And yeah, it feels personal on that level.” Guy continues on to describe one of their favourite singles. “Penance’ was the other one that was personal for me as well. It was more about standing up to bullies in a way, resisting persecution, but on the behalf of other people, not doing it for yourself. You as an individual can probably take a little bit of abuse, but when you see it being directed at people who don't deserve it, it makes you angrier. And that's what that song was about, righteous justice.”

Agnes’ eyes gleam, clearly invigorated by the mere mention of ‘righteous justice.’ “This might be the last swing of the bat for us musically,” she says. “I mean, some people go to therapy, we write songs, right? I think that's probably where the intensity of the performance comes from as well. Because you're singing about stuff, it's so much bigger than you that you don't even feel self-conscious while you're doing it.”

And that’s it, the praxis of Cwfen laid bare. For them, it's not about achieving technical prowess; it’s about authenticity. By forsaking personal lyricisms, themes of feminism, queerness, social justice, and anti-authoritarianism are incidental, not forced. They’re not an explicitly political band, but their sense of righteous indignation is as genuine as they come.

And according to them, they owe a lot of their transgressiveness to their beloved Glasgow. According to Guy; “Most of the other people in the band were born in West Scotland, but they all were peripheral to Glasgow, and it tends to be a kind of collective subconscious, a fairly ego free zone,” he says clearly with a great love for the city. “People won't really give you too much leeway on acting like you're better than anyone else. It's quite a level headed, streetwise place to be, and I think maybe that's been an influence.” Agnes assures me that Cwfen couldn’t be made anywhere else, “It’s a working class city with a strong sense of social justice,” she says. “Very left and very working class, it’s not a conscious thing, but if we're taking a step back and reflecting on what has come out at this very particular point in time, in this very particular place, I can see those fingerprints in it.”

Nowadays the algorithmic pulse of the music industry demands polish, pretense, and performative engagement, Cwfen walk a righteous path. What makes them so compelling isn’t just the way they sound, though that in itself is captivating, it’s the way they mean it. There’s a kind of daring in honesty these days. Theirs is a sound built on catharsis. Every guttural cry from Agnes’ chest, every jagged riff conjured by Guy, is a testament to feeling things too deeply, to knowing that sometimes music is the only space big enough to hold the weight of rage, tenderness, and love all at once. Their constitution isn’t the curated kind you’ll find in a PR bio. It’s in the lyrics, the influences, the unguarded moments when tears threaten to spill mid-verse. It’s in the refusal to soften their message, in their ability to evoke a curse and a requiem in the same breath.

And that’s why Cwfen are rising with such velocity. Not because they’ve cracked some sonic code or courted the right tastemakers, but because in a scene choking on revivalism and recycled edge, they’re simply, determinedly real. Funny what great riffs and uncompromising lyricism can do.

By the sounds of things, Agnes and Guy have had prolific lives in and out of the scene, and now feel like they have settled down into their niche. Cwfen is their new reality, and as of now, it seems like this will be their home for a good while.

Agnes states, “I've made my peace with the fact that if nothing happens with this record, it is a beautiful record of a musical life lived by four friends. And I think that we have made something that is deeply personal to us. We're gonna have this totem at a really special time in our lives, but for us, that's almost enough, it's such a special period. We'll see what happens.”

Sorrows was released on May 30th 2025 via New Heavy Sounds.

Words: Kiarash Golshani

Photos: Cwfen