“When you’re young, you want to shock everyone, but as you grow up you realise that life feels more beautiful”: How Paleface Swiss found themselves

Switzerland is brilliant at a good many things. From chocolate and cheese to master watchmaking and high finance, it is a land of verdant countryside and deep-pocketed prosperity. But nestled just south of Germany it’s never quite been a hotbed for heavy music. Of course, Celtic Frost and Coroner were seminal. And, yes, Basel-based Zeal & Ardor are one of the most important bands of the 21st century. But growing up in the countryside about an hour on the far side of Zurich, Marc "Zelli" Zellweger didn’t feel part of any famous lineage. So when legal pressure came to change the name of his deathcore project Paleface in 2023, he planted his flag with Paleface Swiss.

“It felt like a lot of our American fans thought we were from Sweden,” Zelli grins, just before dinner on a rare day off at his parents’ house. “So we put ‘Swiss’ in there to make it clear for everyone – and to [satisfy] the lawyers. Honestly, I don’t care whether people even use the ‘Swiss’ but it feels like a way to let people know that there is heavy music in this part of the world.”

Truthfully, Zelli likes to be the underdog. In the UK, chances are he’d have long ago been swept up in a local scene awash with crunchy riffs and beatdowns. In France he might’ve been able to benefit from arts funding to support young bands. In North America, he’d probably frequent festivals full of friends from school with or bands from the next town over. Instead, Switzerland threw up its own peculiar socioeconomic circumstances, and challenges Paleface have enthusiastically embraced.

“Living in Switzerland is expensive,” he shrugs, simply. “Since everyone born and raised here has such great opportunities to have a good job, earn good money and lead a good life, there isn’t that same need to break out. In fact, there’s a bigger risk in pursuing music, where you could be leaving that security behind. In comparison, I have so many American friends who started bands feeling like they had nothing to lose. And, let’s be honest here: heavy music is never something you’re likely to make a lot of money from. It’s sad that so many friends of mine are unlikely to ever make it out of Switzerland – or out of the German-speaking part of Europe – because they get caught up in that daily grind where you’re consumed in your work and aren’t willing to take such a big risk.”

Society disincentivises being in a band, so there’s no need for support structures and local scenes to lift artists to the next level. It’s a vicious circle. So what made Zelli and his bandmates Yannick Lehmann (guitar), Tommy-Lee Abt (bass) and Cassiano Toma (drums) the ones to break out?

“Up until May this year, I worked as a plumber on construction sites,” Zelli explains, having recently moved more comprehensively into management and booking for the band. “My boss has told me that if music doesn’t work out, I can always come back. But forever I’d wanted to do something more exciting than my regular day-to-day and during COVID we [properly gave it a shot]. My routine was going from 6am til 6pm at my regular job, then working on music all night. I was so tired all the time. But I just kept grinding. During that lockdown period, it felt like everyone was online all the time, too. We had nothing else to do but post stuff and others had nothing to do but engage with it. Luckily they stayed with us when the world came back!”

Reminiscing on his days on the building sites, Zelli sees plenty of habits that have carried over to life in a band. Work ethic is an obvious one. And the desire to be part of a close-knit family-style enterprise. When a job needed doing, you stayed until it was finished, and if one person was bogged down everyone else would lend a hand so they could clock-off together to go and drink beer. Although Zelli does miss the heavy lifting and getting caught out in the rain, it’s very much the Paleface ethos, too, with almost everyone involved in the project contained within a “small circle”. More than that, they’re unaffected by contrivance or stereotypical music industry bullshit.

“We’re pretty straightforward,” Zelli nods. “I don’t care too much about how it is that we show people what we do. I just want to be as raw and transparent as possible. I have ideas in my head that make sense to me, then I try to commnicate them. I listen to all kinds of music and try to translate them into a metallic sound. And I’ve been told that my vocal style is quite unique. It’s super sick that that’s enough to become a kinda successful band. We’re doing what feels right. And even if other people don’t always love what we do, they can still see that we believe in it.”

Roll back the clock to Paleface’s earliest releases and they’re barely recognisable. 2018 EP Chapter 1: From The Gallows is a gloriously grimy, unapologetically lo-fi slice of slamming death metal full of splatter movie atmosphere and brutish bludgeon. 2019’s Chapter 2: Witch King and 2020’s full-length Chapter 3: The Last Selection honed the production and sharpened the playing, but kept the same gleefully bloodthirsty approach. 2022’s second album Fear & Dagger felt like a qualitative quantum-leap, but featured some of the most defiantly unpleasant sounds to which Paleface had put their name. It was only with this year’s Cursed – now available in its Complete Edition – that the pieces seemed to have fallen into place. Aesthetically, it arrived wrapped in colourful floral imagery, but scratch the surface and see it is fixated on truer darkness inside.

“I’ve never had formal musical education,” Zelli explains that fans digging through Paleface’s back-catalogue can find an uncensored chronicle of their evolution. “All my hardest lessons are clearly there on record for everyone to hear. I produced the first EP 100 per cent myself without knowing anything. Like, ‘Let’s record some music, that sounds like a great idea!’ From there, I’ve just learned as I’ve gone along with very little preparation and a lot of diving in to see where we end up. Loads of people in the industry tell me to take down the first one or two EPs because they don’t sound ‘as they should’. But I always say ‘No!’ I love that people can see where exactly we’ve come from and what is possible if you believe in yourself. There are so many ‘perfect’ bands that come out of the gates fully-formed. I prefer how the beginning of Paleface feels fucked up!”

Shifting from horrific imagery to the more beautiful, and from the sounds of torture and slaughter to more introverted explorations of emotions inside has been part of that same creative growth.

“We’re not scary dudes,” the singer grins. “We’re from Switzerland, surrounded by fields full of cows. I’ve always been a fan of horror and gore but Cursed is more about the things that we’ve actually gone through over the last few years. It’s not all blood and stabbing and broken bones. All in all, we have a really beautiful life. I love flowers and floral imagery. I love everything that grows. We all love each other. We all care for each other. In that, it felt much more personal to do something beautiful. But there are always dark days, too. We all have our little demons that pop out now and again to remind us they’re there. I love the idea of having this pretty artwork, but as soon as you look at what’s inside, you find all the trauma and scary stuff. Because that’s how life is. After you get the album and look at the flowers you press ‘play’ and it’s like, ‘What the fuck?!’”

Age and maturity are part of that, but not in the descent into miserabilism that you might expect.

“When you’re young and full of hate and rage, you want to shock everyone,” Zelli examines his own progression. “But as you grow up you realise that life feels more beautiful. It’s not that the dark days get any more or less dark. It’s that you find new ways to experience the darkness, and new people around you to help bring back the light. It almost makes the darkness beautiful again!”

Hope helps, too, and the prospect of a future that can be anything Paleface choose to make it.

During songwriting and in the studio, Paleface have always insisted that no ideas are off the table. It’s an approach that’s given rise to songs like Cursed highlight Love Burns, which veers from Slipknot-style nu-metal to a Yannick-driven power metal outro that feels utterly unexpected. For Zelli, it’s been pivotal to discover that he can actually sing, as on the gorgeous River Of Sorrows, and validating to see people respond, with that twisted ballad has becoming a shock fan favourite.

“I’ve always wanted to be a really good singer,” Zelli says. “Acoustic singers have always impressed me more than metal vocalists. And it felt so good that when we put out that song, that people loved it. It’s wild that our two or three most streamed tracks include our loudest, heaviest song and our softest, quietest. That feels like proof we can do everything in between those points and maybe even things beyond them. People like my singing. They support it. And they love our heavy stuff, too. Realising that felt definitive for me, like one of the most beautiful moments of my life.”

Not that other people’s reactions weigh too heavily on Paleface Swiss. More important will always be the need to stay true to their vision and to pursue their own happiness. Zelli is willing to take this band as far as it will go, but as he takes his leave, it’s clear that will need to be on their terms.

“I try not to read the comments and to stay away from the internet generally,” he waves off. “But when I do have a look, it’s mind-blowing that people like what we’re doing, that they accept it, that they genuinely want more. And our ultimate goal is to be as diverse and as successful as it is possible for us to be. But only as long as we can enjoy the journey with our friends and family still around us. Of course we want to reach the top of the world, but only if we can do it with a smile!”

Cursed: The Complete Edition is out now. They return for a full UK tour in January 2026.

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• Album review: Paleface Swiss – Cursed
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