Mik was on her back trying not to move. Sebastian Pielnik, the B camera operator, stood above her aiming for her hand. The shot needed him to throw the Ten of Swords card so it landed flat in her palm. It wasn’t going well. About twenty minutes in, with Sebastian cursing his own aim, Mik still had to keep her face still. They’d told her it might be in the frame. The final cut uses the very first take. Her face isn’t in it.
That’s just a quick snapshot from the shoot Expellow put together for “Ten Of Swords“, the video the Zurich metalcore band drop this week, and the first offering in their twentieth year as a band. The clip was directed and produced by Mirko Witzki of Witzki Visions, shot at Rusty Reel Studios, and choreographed by Henrik Gyarmati of Gyarmati Combat. It runs on tarot symbolism and steel swords.
Live Pics by Marco / Heartline Booking / Band photos by Jessica Christ.
The song and the video are created around three cards laid in a past-present-future spread: the Fool, the Ten of Swords, and Death. In the video, a fortune-teller entity delivers all of it to the protagonist up front. She started off her journey fresh and curious, naively so, and that’s the Fool. She’s currently stuck in defeat, a forced ending, the darkest before the dawn, and that’s the Ten of Swords. And her future, the entity says, holds the Death card. Which reads more frightening than it is. The card is usually about transformation, not literal death, though the video leans into the darker read on purpose. The protagonist refuses to hear any of it, and the fortune-teller sends her into the cards. She meets a personified Death, and she loses the fight. She keeps losing. She only turns it around when she admits, in the actual lyrics, “I’ve brought this upon myself.”
“Ultimately, the song, the clip, shows two ways of not accepting your fate,” Mik said. “On the one hand, rejection through pure ignorance without the will to actually change something actively, and on the other hand, rejection combined with the will to put in the necessary work to effectively change something and move from passivity back into action.”
That two-way split shows up on the record itself. The spoken part, “I refuse to accept my fate”, appears twice with two different deliveries by design. The first is aggressive, ignorant, a refusal based on not seeing the full picture. The second is deliberately calmer, more self-assured, the same words carrying whatever happened in between them.
She’s writing from experience. The song came out of a stretch after Expellow won the international Wacken Metal Battle in 2025, becoming the first Swiss band ever to take that title. From the inside, it was not a victory lap.
“Winning the Metal Battle unironically made my anxiety and imposter syndrome almost unbearable for the following months, since my brain was somehow convinced we did not deserve the win,” Mik said. “On top of that, I literally got in a shipwreck while getting caught in a storm on a holiday after Wacken and I then blew several exams at university just a week after that. I can’t even sugarcoat anything about it; I was burnt out.”
What she pulled out of that stretch is the lyric that runs through the piece. “While we cannot always choose what happens to us, we can still choose how we handle life’s challenges. There will always be things that can slow you down or throw you off. But if we find the parts of our life where we are in control, we can take back that control and agency and come back stronger, but we need to be honest with ourselves and where we are keeping ourselves from moving forward.”
Ask the band what actually changed in the months since Wacken and the answers are drier than any label rollout would like them to be. “Not much has changed, honestly,” Mik said. “Maybe people take us a bit more seriously now, Marco has a tad better conditions now when booking, stuff like that. But we also did not have crazy expectations or something. We just went with the flow and were super happy to be chosen and are looking forward to be there again this year.” Nici was even shorter. “We have definitely recieved more attention in the scene. We could have expected everything but I am happy we did not.”
“Ten Of Swords” also arrived through a writing process the band hadn’t used before. “It’s the first project where the entire vision came from me,” Mik said. “Normally, Gudi (Lead Git), Taz (Bass) and Nici (2nd Git) will sit together and work out the riffs and I’ll add matching lyrics and melodies based on their work. This time, I had the entire song including the images for the video clip in my head for a while and really wanted to make it real. Switching the entire writing process upside down and having the boys letting me do all the calls with Mirko without ever getting too involved needs an insane amount of trust and I’m so grateful that the other bandmembers supported the project and trusted my vision.”
Taz and Nici tell the other side of that. “It was indeed a bit strange to shoot a music video without knowing anything about the story,” Taz said. “But Witzki always does a fantastic job so there were absolutely no worries.” Nici kept it simpler: “I can tell you that we had absolute trust in Mik as she was preparing the whole thing and we actually did not know what will be in the script and what not. I think that speaks for it all.”
The treatment Mik walked in with was more ambitious and less practical. Her early vision was a long-march sequence in which the protagonist walked through a strange dimension and encountered several weird entities, drawing heavily from the Fool’s journey in the major arcana. The climax was going to happen in some sort of old cathedral. The Queen of Swords was going to play a role, and the sword itself was going to appear or disappear based on the protagonist’s level of self-reflection. That got scrapped for logistics. Mirko had just opened Rusty Reel, and was excited to use the studio’s infrastructure for the shoot. The trade: favorable conditions in exchange for a good portion of freedom on the storyboard.
The other decisive shift happened on set. Shoot day was also the first time Mik met Henrik Gyarmati in person. She had never held a sword before, and they had less than an hour to prepare. Mirko had planned around foam swords and a very simple choreography. The defeats and the wins were basically going to be the protagonist and then the antagonist getting slowly pushed down in a locked defense. Then she and Henrik started working, and it turned out they could go further.
“Not even an hour later we had several exchanges prepared and had already set them up with steel swords,” Mik said. “I’m super excited about this, the momentum of the steel swords and the higher complexity in the choreographies both add a lot to the final video.” She’s been training at a local HEMA club ever since. “The proudest I am of the choreographies that Henrik and I did. I almost wish you could see even more of them because we really had some crazy sequences prepared.”
Other shoot day moments that made the final cut, or almost didn’t. The fortune-teller was played by Nici, one of Mik’s closest friends in the band and also one of the goofiest. He kept reciting German memes right before takes and then dropping into character, which made her job of sitting across from him with a straight face harder than it needed to be. “I had a hard time staying serious with all the jokes in between, I need things to be a bit less jokey to make them work.”
Then there was the take right after her fall, where Henrik “kicked” her away. Already on her back, she had to rise and drop her upper torso and head down to the floor to simulate the crash. She’d had hair extensions put in the day before. Her scalp hurt so badly she’d slept three hours that night. “It was probably the most painful moment of the entire storyboard despite all the stunts.”
The jump-stab move was scary for someone else on the crew. “Mirko was really scared when filming the jump-stab move because I had to jump from an apple box down towards him stabbing the camera,” Mik said. “He was truly the bravest of us that day.”
Nici’s shoot-day highlight was quieter. “Im proud that i played my extra role without anyone seeing that i did not wear pants,” he said. “Otherwise im just happy my hair looked fine for once.”
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Two decades of the same core also means everyone has settled into their preferred way of working, and not all of them line up. “After twenty years, everyone has found their favorite way of working, to get things done,” Mik said. “Some of these approaches are more, some are less compatible with each other. Communication, especially digital communication, is so important to be handled with care and mutual respect. It’s one of the things that we have learned over the years and where we’ve created lots of middle grounds to meet.”
Ask them what year twenty actually feels like from the inside, and each of them hands you a different piece of the same answer. Moritz starts with gratitude. “If I look back on the past years, what I feel most is gratitude. Gratitude that almost all of us are still here, making music together. Apart from one lineup change on guitar, we’ve shared this journey with largely the same people for a very long time, and Nici has now been part of the band for more than eleven years as well.” He tracks how life has moved around the band. Careers, families, different stages. “Yet the band has always had its place alongside all of that. I think we’ve made a conscious effort to make sure nobody got left behind and that we could keep moving forward together.” He adds Marco to that list, “who has supported us for years in booking and management, but even more importantly as a friend. He’s been a big part of keeping this band together.”
Taz frames year twenty as an ongoing small surprise. “I am still suprised, that after all these years, nothing really feels too repetitive. There is always something new to keep us going.” Nici’s answer stays literal. “Its just amazing how we always find a way to have fun at any kind of show. Whether its a small club show or a big openair, there is always something that just makes it feel right.”
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Mik’s own take looks outward. “There’s hardly grand surprises anymore in the way we work and perform together. But we have recently started, thanks to Marcos help too, add little day trips and stuff when we play a little bit further away, so we’re getting to know local people and culture and participate in local traditions.” She admits they used to skip that entirely. “We were very absorbed with the gigs. Spending these off-times together really adds to the team spirit and broadens our horizons.” She also has a practical note about the anniversary show later this year: “I personally plan to be well recovered from a not-so-cool surgery by then. Other plans, I leave to Marco and the boys until I know more.”
That anniversary show closes 2026. Twenty years of Expellow at the Dynamo Saal in Zurich, held as the Heartline Festival. The lineup announced so far: Vale Tudo, Save Your Last Breath, Malewicz, Still Untitled, and The Wild Haze. “Lots of old and new friends are going to play with us and it’s our chance to give back to the local community and scene,” Mik said. “We want to make it special and celebrate these years, even decade long friendships.”
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Moritz reads that night less as a release show and more as a gathering. “A release show is usually about new music, while this night is about the whole journey. We’ll have people in the crowd who have only recently discovered us, but also friends and supporters who have been around for years. That’s what makes it special. In many ways, it feels less like a regular show and more like a celebration of friendship, memories, and everything we’ve experienced together over the last twenty years.” Nici, characteristically, isn’t overthinking it. “For the dynamo show we dont know yet if its gonna be a full house show or not, but certainly it will be some fun time with all our friends!”
Between “Ten Of Swords” now and the Dynamo Saal in December, the calendar is stacked. A second single, “Embers”, in September. Wacken Open Air return, this time as part of the festival lineup rather than as Metal Battle contenders. Rock The Lakes in Switzerland. Baden in Blut in Germany. Mik expects “Embers” to translate hard live. Gudi likes what the timing gives them: “To have a new release while all this great events happen is going to be great, especially because this gives us the opportunity to play our new material live!” Nici keeps it dry, as he tends to. “Embers is a very nice song to play, so I am too happy we can release it either way.”
Credits. The video was directed and produced by Mirko Witzki / Witzki Vision. B camera by Sebastian Pielnik. Costumes and makeup by Kami Zero. Action design and stunt coordination by Henrik Gyarmati / Gyarmati Combat. Shot at Rusty Reel Studios. Recording, editing, mixing and mastering by Daniel Gutweniger (Expellow’s own Gudi). Vocal recording and vocal consulting by Mahmoud Kattan at Mammoth Audio Engineering. Single artwork by Sandro Büchler / Merchmacher. Organisation by Marco Wenger of Heartline Booking.
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