For a Swiss heavy band, just reaching a stage like Download is a feat, because there’s no machine back home built to push them out into the world. So Paleface Swiss built their own way out. We caught Yannick Lehmann (guitar) and Tommy Lee (bass) fresh off the shuttle, still taking in the scale of their first ever Download. “We just arrived and we’re very stoked to play,” they tell us. “Usually we can just walk to a festival. Here we took a shuttle. It’s very big, so we’re very excited.” Their benchmark for crazy is Bloodstock last year, and Download looked set to top it.
The graft behind that is real. “Switzerland doesn’t have the cultural capacity to push small bands,” Yannick says. “We had to go to the German scene to start our journey.” Play a handful of shows at home and you have already hit the ceiling. “We’d play three shows and that was it. We needed to go to the UK, to Germany, to expand our reach.” There is a thriving scene in Zurich, they say, but it stays put. “Loads of local bands, loads of local shows, but somehow none of them break through. They all stay in Switzerland.”
What got them out was less a masterplan than a lot of mutual generosity. “It was a little networking and being nice to each other. That’s how we got it.” We’ve heard the same from bands all over lately, little pools of artists pulling each other up, and it clearly chimes with how Paleface Swiss see things.
That restlessness runs straight into the music. They opened the year with the Wilted EP, written on the move. “There wasn’t a headspace,” Yannick admits. “We wrote it between shows, headline tours, festivals, between everything. It’s packed with all the emotions of those tours.” Last year’s album Cursed closed on ‘Rivers of Sorrow’, where the vocals turned from a scream to a sing. Does that feel more exposed? “Yes, of course, but we wanted to experiment, to try something new, to evolve,” he says. We put it to them that the contrast between clean and rough vocals adds real depth and emotion, and they agreed without hesitation.
The band call their fans the cursed ones, and there is a real sense of belonging for people who carry pain. Asked what the community means, Tommy doesn’t hesitate. “It means everything. Just yesterday I was talking to fans who were so grateful I took the time. But I tell them, I’m grateful for you, because we get to live our dreams through you. The community is very deep, and I love our fans. They’re amazing.”
Ask them to picture Cursed as a room and you get flowers, and the rooms from the album’s own videos, which they reckon already capture the feeling. And the feeling itself? “Everything is dark and bad, like someone losing everything in their life. It’s a feeling people don’t want to admit, but it’s out there, and it’s important to talk about it.” That honesty is exactly why the cursed ones connect so hard.
Asked to describe themselves as weather and an object, what comes back says everything about them. The weather is a storm, “a storm that brings everything, happiness, sadness, anger, because we have so many faces. Every song is different, every song has a different emotion.” The object is a flower. Some days shining, some days not. A storm and a flower, brutal and tender at once, which is Paleface Swiss in a sentence.
For a band so at home in the dark, their values are bright. The one thing they want people to stop is drink driving, which genuinely angers them. “It’s the most stupid thing you can do. You ruin everyone’s life and your own.” The one thing to start is “Talk more positively about yourselves. Be nice to each other, accept everyone for who they are, whatever their sexuality or gender. Everyone is beautiful in their own way.” As we said to them at the time, it’s nice to be nice.
No UK dates are locked in yet, but they are never still. “There’s always stuff planned. We’ve been to Europe and America a lot, so the other countries will get some love in the future.” A run of European festivals is coming, and new music is a given. “We are always working. There’s no stopping. It’s just a matter of time.”
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