Picture the scene. You’re out on an early hike deep in the woods in rural Switzerland. The sun is out but it’s a cool and misty October morning. The nearest town is an hour away. It’s just you and nature, and the only noises around you are a few occasional bird twitters and the sound of twigs and mud, crunching and squelching beneath your feet.
It’s peaceful. Serene, even. Then, from nowhere, a scream. Well, it’s kind of halfway between a scream and a roar, actually. Like some desperate, frenzied wild beast that sounds like it’s getting closer – and fast. You look around, sweat starting to pool under your woolly beanie. Something’s hurtling up the road to your left. It’s a werewolf! It’s a banshee! It’s a… It’s a… It’s a 13-year-old boy on an electric bike, screaming his guts up as he merrily flies past you without a care in the world.
“When you say it like that, it sounds really weird!” laughs Marc ‘Zelli’ Zellweger, who was once the boy on the bike, apparently only considering this for the first time now. “I had a very long way to school, through the forest. Nobody could hear me, so I sat on that little bike every day for an hour, screaming!”
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Fourteen years on, Zelli is still screaming. The difference is that people are screaming along with him now. In the last couple of years, his band, Paleface Swiss, have exploded out of the metal underground, evolving from a brutally heavy hardcore band into one of the most considered and interesting artists in metal today, with frontman Zelli their magnetic focus.
Chatting to us today from his pad in the countryside an hour outside Zürich, he looks every inch the modern metal heartthrob: slim build, piercing blue eyes, foppish blonde hair, mischievous grin. He laughs off the idea he’s any kind of pin-up (“Nobody is interested in me!”), but your average, beardy, heavy metal hairball he isn’t. He’s also annoyingly well-dressed at all times, preferring high-street fashion to band merch – something he puts down to being passionate about “visual stuff”.
“I like beautiful things,” he shrugs. “I like photography. I like videography. I like creating.”
Zelli is clearly comfortable in his own skin these days, but that wasn’t always the case. He describes his younger self as “really shy”, and it took a few years of growth – and a few unpleasant childhood experiences – before he really came out of his shell.
“In kindergarten, I always got beaten up by girls,” he remembers. “Yeah, yeah, crazy,” he adds, seeing Hammer’s surprise. “I always came home with my head full of blood. They were punching holes in my head with umbrellas. It was fucked up.”
He’s quick to give his young bullies the benefit of the doubt, though.
“Apparently, the girls’ mother got beaten up by her husband, so they didn’t know better than beating up other boys. I don’t remember it at all, though – my mom told me. There was a very dark time in my childhood that I don’t remember.”
What Zelli does recollect of his childhood is far less dramatic. Raised alongside his younger sister in a single-parent household, he ended up moving around a lot due to his mum regularly changing jobs.
“She had to work multiple jobs at the same time in order to buy the fucking expensive food in Switzerland.”
Eventually, around the age of 11, he moved to the area he lives in now, a small town in the sticks. He discovered Slipknot after a friend of his mum’s showed him some photos of “scary” metal bands, and soon decided that was the life for him.
“I always wanted to be a drummer, because I liked hitting stuff,” he says. “But my mom didn’t have the money to buy a drum kit or rent a drum room, and we always were in apartments. Obviously, I couldn’t play in the apartment.”
Instead, he began screaming on that bike ride to school. Luckily, he was really good at it. By his late teens, having knocked around the Swiss hardcore scene for a couple of years, he decided to start a band with a drummer friend, Colin ‘CJ’ Hammond, after seeing Knocked Loose live (understandable, have you seen Knocked Loose live?!).
In one of the more unlikely origin stories you’ll read, guitarist Yannick Lehmann joined the fold after Zelli found out his cheating ex-girlfriend had also cheated on Yannick… with Zelli. With the singer having had no idea the girl in question was already seeing Yannick when they got together, the duo quickly buried the hatchet and became besties.
“We invited her to our very first show, like, ‘Look what you made!’” Zelli laughs. “But she never came. And since then, she’s gone from the internet. We don’t know where she is. We don’t know anything about her.”
that bizarre love triangle may not have worked out romantically for anyone involved, but it’s certainly worked out for Paleface Swiss. Completing their line-up with Tommy-Lee on bass (not the Mötley Crüe one, obviously), the quartet released their first EP, Chapter 1: From The Gallows, in 2018 under the moniker Paleface, serving a gritty slab of bruising beatdown hardcore. They then began smashing their way through toilet venues across Switzerland and Germany – literally.
“There were people fighting all the time at those early shows,” recalls Zelli with another grin. “That was really exciting for me. Everybody’s a target: I broke my nose several times.”
As fun as all the mayhem was, it was clear that Paleface had ambitions far beyond basement hardcore all-dayers. By 2022, the band had dished out another EP and two studio albums, lurching from that early beatdown sound into ferocious, histrionic deathcore. Naturally, the sonic shift then infuriated other bands in the underground hardcore community. How did Paleface Swiss react? They didn’t give a shit.
“They would say that we used beatdown as a stepping stone to become famous,” says Zelli with an eye-roll. “I’m like, ‘Brother, we don’t use the smallest fucking genre in the world to become a big band.’ That makes no sense. That’s literally the smallest stone we’d step on. It’s dumb. And guess what? Those bands are playing in front of the same 20 people. Yeah, crazy stepping stone you built!”
Ditching genre restrictions has paid off. Last year the band released Cursed, their third album and first under the name Paleface Swiss (it turns out there was already a US singer-songwriter named Paleface). It was their boldest work yet, a blast of a record that mixed deathcore with Slipknot-indebted nu metal, melodic post-metal and grinding industrial noise.
It found Zelli not only screaming his guts up but crooning his heart out and even rapping, as he confronted everything from heartbreak and mental health struggles to toxic masculinity in the metal scene.
The experimentation continues on January’s five-track The Wilted EP, which features their first out-and-out power ballad, Everything Is Fine. But then pushing against expectations shouldn’t be a surprise – at one point in our conversation, Zelli says he’d likely be a rapper “or a dubstep DJ” if the band didn’t exist.
“I hate labelling stuff,” he states. “I don’t like labels at all. Just do cool things, you know? The only label I want to have is ‘cool’.”
It’s by no means just musically that Paleface Swiss are pushing buttons. Where many of their peers are concerned with making the heaviest breakdowns possible in the name of chest-beating, macho thuggishness, Zelli and co. are bringing some vulnerability into the mix.
The cover art for Cursed doesn’t feature violent imagery or cartoonish gore; it shows all four bandmates lying down and draped over each other on a bed of flowers. It’s peaceful. It’s calm. It’s actually quite pretty. Hardly the first word you tend to reach for in a world of beatdowns and blastbeats.
“It was never meant to be that picture for the cover,” Zelli reveals. “That photo was meant to be for promo. We were just there talking to each other, nearly falling asleep and having nice conversations. We’d had such a great time as a band, filming the music videos, writing the album and hanging out with each other, and we really started to love each other more and more. That whole memory and how this photo came to life just felt perfect. I really like to look back at that time.”
It’s the kind of image bound to wind up knuckledragging alpha bros who want masculinity in metal to look and feel a certain way. Naturally, Zelli doesn’t give a shit. In fact, he loves poking that particular hornet’s nest. He and drummer Cassiano ‘Cassi’ Toma (who replaced CJ in 2023) have a tradition of sharing a kiss onstage, and he’s been delighted to find that it’s a good way of weeding out dickheads in the crowd.
“You have no idea how many walk out of the room every time we do that,” he sighs, adding that it’s men in America who seem to get most offended. “Obviously, I’m glad that they leave. I don’t know what kind of band they think we are, but they clearly have a problem with me kissing another man onstage for enjoyment. I don’t want to keep those kinds of people.
“Why do we kiss onstage? Why not?” he shrugs. “‘I like you. You like me. Let’s have fun. A little smooch. Thank you for being here.’ If you have a problem with us doing that, fuck off.”
Is he waging war on toxic masculinity?
“Yeah, I think so,” he confirms. “I’m a small man, I’m not a bear. I’m not very ‘masculine’ anyway. Let me have my fun, though. Let me experience my sexuality. Don’t be mad at me for having fun in my life. I don’t hurt anybody!”
Pissing off homophobes is all well and good, but Zelli also has a longtime partner from before the band even started. Is she cool with him casually enjoying himself with other people like that?
“We’re both super-open,” replies the singer. “We talk to each other so much about all that. We know that we love each other, and we find each other very attractive, but we never want to be at a point of being in a relationship for 100 years, looking back and being like, ‘Did we miss something out? Should we have tried a bit more stuff?’”
Paleface Swiss can still play as hard as anyone. Their mid-afternoon set at last summer’s Bloodstock set off some of the biggest pits of the weekend. And there in the centre of it all was Zelli, looking like he’d walked straight off a catwalk to command the masses.
But in a scene filled with insecure meatheads, he’s a rare breed of frontman: self-assured, progressive, fashionable, sexually fluid, wrapping brutality in flowers instead of blood and thunder. He’s a new breed of rock star for a new generation of metalheads.
“When I see people look up to us and think, ‘That’s a real band, I want to be like them…’” he begins, before trailing off. He pauses for a moment, before adding: “If that makes me a rock star, well, I guess I am one. But I don’t feel like a rock star at all.”
Regardless, Paleface Swiss now have the look and feel of a band with the world at their feet. It’s a world where Knocked Loose can play mainstream US chat shows and Gojira can play the Olympics. The ceiling on heavy music is the highest it’s been in a very long time. Just how far does Zelli think he and his bandmates can go?
“We want to be the biggest band in the world,” he begins. Before Hammer can point out that plenty of bands want that, he quickly adds: “As long as we’re happy. As long as we’re smiling, we want to take this as far as humanly possible. If it starts becoming too serious, I want to stop doing it. But as long as I’m excited to leave my house, I want to push this as far as I can – and project a smile on as many people’s faces as possible.”
Zelli’s not just having fun, he’s changing metal for the better. And if you don’t like it, well… you know where the door is.
The Wilted EP is out now. Paleface Swiss play Sonic Temple in May and Download Festival in June.
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