“There was a wishing well, a three-legged black cat, and the live room overlooked the mist-covered countryside.” Meet Cwfen, the Scottish doom witches giving Macbeth a run for his money

Cwfen Press 2025.

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.”