The EDM star Marshmello, who headlines festivals wearing a giant, smiley-faced white helmet that glows in the dark, is well-named—his music is sugary fluff, but it sticks more than you might prefer. There is a circus-carousel, kiddie-raiding-the-sugar-bowl quality to his tunes, and he’s singed a generation’s retinas with one of the most over-the-top light and video shows in EDM, a business where excessive displays are the norm.
Now he’ll bring that spectacle, albeit remotely, to the Pepsi-sponsored opening ceremony of the Champions League final in Portugal on Saturday — the biggest event on the soccer calendar outside of the World Cup. “This will be the most different show I’ve ever done, ever, and the most sophisticated,” Marshmello, whose real name is Chris Comstock, told GQ. One thing likely to be missing from the display, however: The light-up marshmallow heads that hardcore fans often wear to his shows, which only adds to the audiovisual bombardment coming from the stage.
“When me and my manager first started, our goal was to just have mainstage slots at EDM festivals,” Marshmello said. “But I listened to so much other music that I made it a point from the start to produce other genres, hip-hop, pop music; I have a country song. And it was accepted. [That] led me to the other kinds of music festivals. I didn’t necessarily see it coming—[crossover] wasn’t in our minds right when we started the project. But it skyrocketed it from there, which I’m super-thankful for.”
Marshmello has never revealed what he looks like under the mask, although he has pranked fans a few times with fake reveals. “To be honest, at the beginning, we didn’t say, ‘OK, Marshmello is going to have a helmet that looks like this,’” he said. “We went through, do I wear a bandana on my face? Do I wear a big hoodie that covers my face? Do I not wear anything? What do we do?’ We had a logo, and we would just post that logo with my music, because we were posting a song a day for two weeks straight. I don’t know how I did that or why I was doing it, but it was this style of music that I was drawn to. And we were like, ‘Wait a second, this logo is kind of cool. This looks like a sick helmet. So my manager got it made and I was like, ‘You know what? Let’s just do it and see how it goes.’ We didn’t really know what to expect.”
What they got was mayhem—especially at Marshmello’s appearances at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in 2019, where his own “Fly” gave way to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and stadium anthems like the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” His three albums, titled Joytime, Joytime II, and Joytime III, did not stir critics—Pitchfork’s review called the middle one “a pile of garish and unmemorable synth-slop that’s as charmless as the mask atop his head.” Judging from the last couple years’ non-album tracks on his SoundCloud page, he’s moving determinedly toward an infusion of scratchily sung self-help lyrics (by a number of guests, including, on the late 2020 track “Too Much,” R&B singer Usher).
But for many, Marshmello is most famous for his tiff with another hugely popular EDM producer who wears a large, cartoonish mask, Deadmau5, a few years ago. After Comstock’s character lightly mocked his headgear-donning forebear in a couple of videos, the ’mau5 responded with a snide tweet—and then outed Marshmello’s real name, which to that point had been an industry secret. It was highly reminiscent of professional wrestling.
Today, Marshmello is subdued about all this. “I grew up listening to Deadmau5, you know? He’s definitely a pioneer of electronic dance music for sure,” he says. “I don’t want to get too much into it. No, it’s old news. And as far as that mask goes, I have no animosity towards him.” Post-pandemic, he’s hoping to do less feuding: “I think there could possibly be a little bit more compassion. Things have slowed down and like people have kind of really gotten a chance to look at themselves. All the beefs of any genre—just relax a little bit.”
The DJ-music world had a particularly difficult time with lockdown; on social media, a number of promoters and DJs have been shaming their peers for putting on and playing “plague raves.” But Marshmello is inching back into things—there is a new album, which he’s largely mum about (Joytime IV?). “It’s about 95 percent done,” he says. “Everybody can expect it in the next few months.”