On Tuesday night I headed along to The Black Heart in Camden to see Faetooth. I bought a ticket for this show months ago when it was first announced, so I had been excited about it for a long time.
Support came from another band I had been really keen to see live – Cwfen (pronounced “coven”) from Glasgow. Cwfen play heavy, haunting doomgaze with an incredibly mixture of clean and unclean vocals, and some brilliant guitar parts.
Cwfen played an excellent set of tracks from their debut album Sorrows, which was released 30 May 2025 and is an absolute belter – I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys witchy, doomy, tunes with fantastic vocal and guitar parts. I was thrilled to be able to purchase the vinyl direct from the band, which I gleefully clutched tight on the tube home from the gig. They are a brilliant live band, and vocalist Agnes’ corpsepaint-style make-up made her particularly fun to photograph. I really enjoyed the band’s dark, gothic, doomy heavy sound, and they were brilliant live. I particularly enjoyed “Wolfsbane”, “Whispers” and “Embers”.
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By the time Faetooth took to the stage the room was absolutely heaving as this was a sold-out show. They opened their set with “White Noise” from their second album, Labyrinthine, which is due to be released on 5 September. Their self-described “fairy doom” sound was as entrancing as it was engaging, and they played a brilliant set including some of their most well-known songs such as “Echolalia”, “Death Of A Day”, and “She Cast A Shadow”. There was a real mix of people in the room, which was great to see and proof that their distinctive fusion of doomy, sludgy, shoegaze appeals to a wide variety of music fans.
This show was one of six UK dates (together with a set at Download Festival) as part of the Los Angeles trio’s UK / EU tour. It was nice to see that of the six UK shows, half of them were outside the primary touring circuit: Huddersfield, Norwich, and Ramsgate. This is really refreshing to see as venues in these towns and cities are getting fewer and fewer shows from non-local bands, and it is tours like this that help keep them going. As someone who has lived in London all her life I realise how spoiled I am for gigs, but I can only imagine how nice it must be for a band to be playing your local venue if you are outside of the major towns and cities.
In summary – a thoroughly enjoyable doomy evening in a packed and sweaty room, which is how live music should be enjoyed.
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Faetooth: facebook | instagram | bandcamp
Cwfen: facebook | instagram | bandcamp
Photos by Katie Frost Photography
