Last year, Ethel Cain gave us over two and a half hours of new music ranging from slowcore ballads steeped in middle-American melancholy to straight up dark-ambient doom. Although she’s mostly spent 2026 performing this new material at festivals, she’ll close out the year by collaborating with Robert Eggers on Werwulf, the filmmaker’s second consecutive horror project intended to disrupt the family tradition of Christmas-day trips to the movie theater. Eggers wrote the lyrics for “Wynter Waxeth”—in Middle English, naturally—which he then passed along to Cain and his longtime composer collaborator, Robin Carolan.
“It’s always been my dream to score a horror film in some way, and I couldn’t think of a more perfect first opportunity than getting to work with Rob and Robin on a song for Werwulf,” Cain shared. “We were immediately creatively aligned so the entire process felt very intuitive and natural. It felt like I was back in the heart of the music I started off making at the beginning of my career, which felt really good to return to. Robin sent me a bunch of old medieval music at the beginning and was very into the psaltery, which introduced me to the traditional instrument. I bought one online and wound up plucking out this simple little harp line on it and that’s where the song began.”
There’s a bit of new-age to the softly droning cut, aligning it with Enya’s contribution to the equally black-metal Lord of the Rings trilogy. Is Ethel Cain gonna get an Oscar nod before she gets one from the GRAMMYs? Check out the new track below, and pre-order the full Werwulf soundtrack here.
