Dan Hillier
Formed of members Agnes Alder (vocals, guitars), Guy DeNuit (guitars, vocals), Rös Ranquinn (drums) and Mary Thomas Baker (Bass), the Glaswegian quartet aren’t an entity devoted to all things goth as they are a band seemingly conjured by it. Meaning, there’s a genuine sense of authenticity to their sound and presence, something that has been evident from their very beginnings. After all, one doesn’t get to play alongside acts like Svalbard, Dopethrone, Agriculture and even Deafheaven all before releasing a record without genuine good reason. Cwfen seem to have an almost elemental, birth-given mastery of all things musically shrouded, which is something they prove with their luscious debut Sorrows.
Released today via New Heavy Sounds, here, Cwfen tap into the musical laylines in which they’ve seemingly emerged from to conjure a range of shadowed motifs prior to bending them to their whim. The sultry swagger of Type O Negative and the ashen stylings of Chelsea Wolfe may be most evident, but beneath the veil lies the faces of cinematic post metal in the vein of Amenra, the esoteric doom of King Woman and nuanced chemistry abundant. All of this is then articulated beautifully, with Cwfen using these organic musical stylings to animate narrations on queer love, defiance, burnout, mortality and corruption. Which, in total, ultimately proves just how vital this record is. Sorrows may be bountiful with musical and aesthetic substance, but it’s also one of genuine meaning and purpose.
With the record out now, we got in touch with Agnes to break down Sorrows, track by track.
‘This was one of the first two songs I wrote for Cwfen, so it feels fitting that it kicks off the album. I’d locked myself in the studio with just a guitar, a bass, a tiny interface, and some downloaded drum tracks, and Bodies was what came out. The riffs arrived first. I wanted to write something heavy and lurching thing, and the vocals followed soon after. Once I’d finished the demo, I sent it to Guy, and that’s really how Cwfen began. He took it and ran with it, and from there we started shaping the rest together.
Lyrically, I’d been thinking a lot about burnout, about becoming monstrous in the face of everything expected of you. I imagined this vast, cosmic matriarchal horror. Not the tidy, pleasing kind of woman, but a terrifying, devouring presence that takes up space and won’t be reasoned with. It was cathartic to write. Permission to be frightening. And it still feels like that when we play it.
Was also the first song where I ever tried out doing heavy vocals. I’d been secretly teaching myself in private, and had a go at band practice one day, and I’ve never looked back!’
‘Fittingly for song two, ‘Wolfsbane’ was the other song I wrote to kick things off for Cwfen. I wrote ‘Bodies’ and ‘Wolfsbane’ back to back over two days. I wanted to write something menacing. Something that sort of stalked around, and after a little playing around with ideas, this is what came out, fairly quickly.
This one’s always felt like the fire-starter of the record. The one where I’m not just singing for me, but for every woman in the room. On the surface it’s about poison. But underneath, it’s about rage. That wild, clear-headed feminine rage that appears when the world keeps trying to shrink you. It’s a song about what happens when you’ve had enough.
We shaped it together as a band, but its core has always been defiance, and it comes from a place of personal experience. When we play it live, it feels like setting something alight. I very much enjoy looking into the eyes of everyone in the front row. One of my absolutely favourite things is when I spot women in the crowd singing it back at me. I guess it’s a sort of rallying cry not to take things lying down. And a reminder that there is collective strength there if we stand up together.’
‘So this is the first song on the record where we take it down a touch. Just for a moment, don’t worry – it gets pretty big at the end! This is definitely one of our more introspective songs, one where I get to lean into being gentle, knowing what’s coming round the corner. Guy had this riff ready to go, and when he played it to me, it was one of those seeing-the-matrix moments where I just knew where everything needed to go and what should happen. I just started singing and then had to grab a pen and write down what was coming out.
We’d recently been on a trip to Bruges, one of our favourite places, spending a lot of time looking at paintings by the Flemish primitives, at an excellent exhibition called Eye to Eye with Death. All those luminous, heavy stillnesses affected me, as did spending a lot of time in spooky old churches like the Basilica of the Holy Blood. I’d also been revisiting the Wolf Hall trilogy (some of my favourite books), and thinking about that moment in history where people were killed for belief, or the wrong version of belief. Where faith became a battleground, and the body becomes a relic. And I remember thinking how strange it was that we would venerate parts of a person, and how horrifying that actually is when you abstract it out of a faith context.
The lyrics came fast. It’s ultimately about facing your final moments, when everything you thought you knew starts to unravel. It’s not really about faith. It’s about the quiet fear that your ideas about life, death, justice, God, yourself, might not hold. And what’s left of you when that happens. When we released it on Samhain, that felt right too. A day for transition, reflection, reckoning. That liminal space is where ‘Reliks’ sits.’
Cwfen – Sorrows | Album Review
‘I wrote some version of this one a long time ago. I guess you consider the bones of this one a relic of my musical history in some way. I’d always come back to the riff and the melody, and felt like it needed to be brought back to life. In Cwfen, it found a new purpose and a new meaning for me personally.
It’s the only track on the album that’s about something deeply personal and quite painful. The big screams at the end are very real. I wasn’t even sure I could make that noise until I heard it come out of me. It’s the only one that when we recorded it, I wanted to leave it to one side as I wasn’t convinced about my first thoughts for the ending. We left it a little while, and came back to it later. On this fresh listen I had a flash of inspiration, and just knew what I had to do. I went into the live room, picked up my mics (two of them taped together!), and just let loose. No one knew what I was doing or what was coming. We got it in one.
There’s a different sound that comes out of that kind of emotional vulnerability. I’m still a bit nervous about going there, to be honest. It’s definitely easier, for me, to write about something imagined or mythical or historical. Something with a bit of distance. This one isn’t like that. It came from somewhere much closer to the bone.’
‘This was one that Guy had written, and I was really excited to sing. This song came to me with really strong bones and a very clear idea, and it resonated with me straight away. From the first line, I could see where the song wanted to go lyrically, and through that process it sort of became imbued with my own meaning too.
‘Penance’ is heavy. And it has this sort of brooding quality that makes space for big feelings like grief, guilt, reckoning. It’s not a song about closure. It’s a song about walking back through what you’ve done, or maybe who you’ve been. There’s a thread of gothic religious imagery running through it, which is always ripe for exploration. Confession, punishment, ritual etc. Though I think it’s less about atonement and more about what it means to be changed by facing something honestly.
It’s one of the rawer vocal performances on the record. I think because it holds tension the whole way through. It doesn’t ask for forgiveness, but it doesn’t look away either.’
‘This is my favourite of our songs. I’m probably not supposed to say that, but it’s the one that means the most to me personally. It’s what had gotten me out of my songwriting slump after years of not doing any. I’d initially written it as a sort of darkwave song just before I decided to start Cwfen as a project and go in a different direction. Not the lyrics, but the mood of the song, the dynamic. It’s one of those ones that you just get that sort of sixth sense about when writing it. It’s almost like the song writes you.
At the time I was reading Devotion by Hannah Kent. She is this gorgeously sensual, lush writer. She has this wandering, poetic way of writing that I absolutely adore. The song, like the book, is about queer love and longing. The hush of it, the fire of it, the solace found in another when the world doesn’t want what you have to exist. The novel’s atmosphere of aching quiet, forbidden closeness and a love that transcends material reality was something I wanted to try and evoke. That idea of a hidden, wordless intensity between two people, that can demand sacrifice, shaped the emotional core of the song. It’s about desire, and the cost of it, and the pain of not being able to be who you are supposed to be, or with the person you love. When I sing it, it puts me in a very different headspace, and I have to close my eyes to get it out as intended.
This is the one most people have come up to talk to me about after a show. It changes the mood of the room when we play it.’
‘Rite is our burn-everything-to-the-ground song. It used to be our set closer, and it’s currently become our opener, which certainly wakes you up. It’s a song that makes a statement, and it’s 100% in your face from the first bar. This was another of Guy’s songs that I heard and immediately got excited about.
It’s a song about questioning authority, power, systems, ideas. Lyrically, it’s probably one of the more direct in that sense. We’re living through a time where we’ve seen great strides forward to being a more progressive, more inclusive society, and suddenly it feels like everything is snapping backwards with an equally violent velocity. So what are we going to do about it? Are we just going to sit here and let it happen, or are we going to kick back? Rite is about that. A personal reckoning with compliance and an invitation to a sort of insurrection, whatever that might look like personally. Sometimes people need a reminder not to sit still and accept the status quo.
Plus, it’s a chance to go all in on the harsh vocals which I absolutely adore. Doing that live and seeing how people respond is still a very new thing for me, and it feels incredibly liberating to stand up there and scream from your toes!’