SPEED Won’t Stop Until You Make Them

By now, the scenes are biblical: SPEED frontman Jem Siow prowling up and down the stage at the 2022 iteration of the Sound and Fury festival, the blazing California sun beating down as the Sydney hardcore band’s breakout track “Not That Nice” roars to life. The crowd’s buzz can be heard over Josh Clayton and Dennis Vichidvongsa’s groaning guitars as drummer Kane Vardon leads SPEED in. A craterous circle of death opens near the stage as bodies start moving as far as the eye can see.

Jem holds the microphone in a vise grip. To his left, Josh soaks in the spectacle. Opposite Josh, Dennis plants his feet and starts shredding, carnage exploding in front, behind, and all around him. Standing in the middle, bassist Aaron Siow watches his older brother Jem bounce on the lip of the stage, narrowly avoiding being swallowed up by a mosh pit full of diving bodies, swinging limbs, and spin kicks.

“We’ve had so many experiences in the last 15 years of playing in bands where you will drive 20 hours and play to 10 people and then you drive back,” Jem tells Complex Australia, Josh nodding next to him. “You eat, shit and sleep in the van on the way home. We’re so accustomed to that. So for us to fly to America for the first time ever, to get up on that stage and look out at a sea of 6,000 people…”

Josh remembers hearing a “drone of people yelling” before the set started. “I was like, ‘Holy shit, everybody’s really excited to see us.’ It was a feeling I’ve never had before in music,” Josh says. “We started playing and it was the most insane set, like 20 times more violent than any hardcore show I’ve ever experienced.”

The Sound and Fury set put into motion a two-year run of accolades, opportunities, and oddities: SPEED scored a J Award nomination, opened for hardcore heroes Turnstile and Knocked Loose, found themselves on a WWE 2K video game soundtrack, and saw their merchandise worn by the likes of Post Malone, Travis Barker, and Kourtney Kardashian.

But most consequently, the revelatory Sound and Fury set became the catalyst for SPEED’s long road to their debut album, ONLY ONE MODE. “The response we had at that show was beyond anything any of us had ever conceptualised; it was beyond anything we’d seen an Australian hardcore band do before,” Jem says.

Suddenly, SPEED were one of the fastest rising hardcore bands in the world. Jem estimates they’ve toured the United States four or five times, they’ve played across Europe and Asia, and routinely sell out shows back home in Australia. But with just an EP, a split single and a brief demo to their name, Jem began to fear the “hype superseded the substance.”

“To be a band that tours the world, we need an album, and it needs to be a good fucking album. We need something that lives up to the respect that we have from our audience,” Jem says.

Many would say SPEED have already earned that respect: in five years, the band has levelled up on every release and achieved rarefied air as a hardcore band crossing over outside of their community. They’ve co-headlined shows with Newcastle-born dance guru Mall Grab, as well as Melbourne rappers Miko Mal and Posseshot and Brisbane’s Nerve, while their merchandise—from Aaron’s Del Saato clothing brand—has become a staple in the wardrobes of hardcore kids and streetwear fans alike.

But if there was anything left for SPEED to prove, ONLY ONE MODE does it. It’s an unrelenting 25 minutes that honours the SPEED sound—a sharpened spin on classic 90s New York hardcore—while using the expanded tracklist to experiment and get outside of their comfort zone.

Tracks such as “The First Test” chugs headfirst into a nodding nu-metal jam section that includes a Limp Bizkit-nodding record scratch and the flute, played by Jem. “Kill Cap” is a vivid, wrenching song about losing a friend, while album closer “Caught In A Craze” is the longest song SPEED has ever recorded, churning through an odyssey of hardcore.

Although the band is pushing themselves on the record, ONLY ONE MODE stays true to what has made SPEED a ceiling-shattering hardcore band. While some hardcore thrives because it feels like a frenzied fight between instruments, SPEED’s songs feel like a symphony that’s conjuring a storm in perfect harmony. It’s the sonic companion to the tsunami-like dust storm in Mad Max: Fury Road, a thrilling natural spectacle to be feared and admired, crackling with electricity. At once overwhelming with everything in the right place.

Part of preserving their magic came from keeping every part of the process within the family. SPEED shunned other offers and stayed with Last Ride and Flatspot Records, the band’s first and only labels to date.

In Last Ride, SPEED were able to stay tethered to a friend and local champion of the scene in owner Tom Maddocks. On Flatspot, the band—which includes three first-generation Asian-Australians in Jem, Aaron, and Dennis—sits alongside a range of acts like Zulu, Buggin, and Scowl, who are helping keep hardcore diverse among the all-white, all-male lineups often seen in other parts.

“We wanted to make sure we stayed with the labels that helped us in the beginning because we wanted to build something with them. I hope that it’s rewarding for them, too,” Josh says.

SPEED recorded the album at Annandale’s Chameleon Studios with Elliott Gallart, one of Jem and Josh’s oldest friends who has produced every song the band has released.

“Nobody understands our interpretation of hardcore better than Elliott because he’s been there with us every step of the way,” Josh says. He is just as effusive talking about Jack Rudder, who handles all of the band’s videos and live photography.

“The amount of work that people around us put into the band makes us feel like we can’t step back. We have to keep pushing as hard as we do because everybody else around us does as well. We’re just products of our friends and our community.”

As their name suggests, SPEED moves fast. ONLY ONE MODE takes its title from the band’s ethos, throwing themselves full pelt into performing, recording, working out, being ambassadors for the hardcore, you name it.

But SPEED can’t stay in this gear forever. The band has just spent nine weeks overseas, exacting a heavy physical and mental toll on them. Moving forward, Jem and Josh agree that they’re going to try to cap each stint abroad at a month.

“We’ve just come back from 45 shows over nine weeks,” Jem says. “I’m 31, Josh is 31. Dennis is 35. We have long-term relationships that started many years before this band was even an idea. So to quit our careers and leave our families and play in this hardcore band to this extent? It was never, ever on the cards.”

SPEED’s founding mission was to “pick up the mantle and be the flag bearers for hardcore in Australia,” but Josh insists their stewardship of the scene has to be fleeting.

“We want to push the culture forward, but we can only do that for so long. When we were coming up, the people that were our age right now were the old heads. If there was somebody over 30 going to shows, you'd be like, ‘Fuck, that guy's been around for a while.’”

“We dream of a thriving infrastructure for Australian hardcore where the next generation can come through, feel a community they belong in, go to shows, put out demos, and know there'll be people moshing and hanging out,” Jem adds.

Having witnessed the scene go through less prosperous times—Jem estimates a “good show” in 2019 would draw around 100 people at most—the band is set on staying as long as it takes to fortify the future of Australian hardcore. It’s a shift already in motion, with the boys name-checking Burning Hammer Records in Queensland and New Ethic Records in Melbourne.

“Our main motivation is for there to be a new generation to pick up the torch and keep running it,” Josh says. “We don't really feel like we can stop as a band until that exists.”

It’s not lost on Jem and Josh how much the band has already achieved. But when asked about the material success of the band, both opt to look past it and focus on the way SPEED has transformed their lives.

“Starting this band at 28 after spending a lot of time figuring out who we are, SPEED has been a coming-of-age experience. It’s one of the first times I’ve acknowledged who I am, embraced that, and put it into the music,” says Jem.

For Jem, that meant bringing together his two lives as a hardcore musician and classical flutist, something he’d long refused to combine.

“I never wanted to do anything gimmicky or for the sake of it. I would only do it if it furthered the art. When we wrote this album, the two parts where the flute exists—“Real Life Love” and the jam section in “The First Test”—were exactly what I heard organically in my mind when listening back to the demos. I just put that down, sent it to the fellas and they were like, “Yeah, let’s keep it in.’”

Before the band went full-time, Josh worked an office job where he lived in fear that his double life as a hardcore musician would be unearthed. Playing in SPEED gave him newfound confidence and perspective.

“It’s now a full-time commitment, but it’s the most rewarding thing ever. If you interviewed someone from my family, they’d tell you how I’ve changed over the last few years because of this band. It’s the most significant thing any of us have ever done in our lifetimes.”

The sincerity shines through the Zoom call, even with the pair weary from a long day of being in demand from the media.

ONLY ONE MODE comes out as the band is back in the United States, playing a run of shows alongside hardcore titans such as God’s Hate and Have Heart. They’ll then come back home for their biggest Australian tour yet, a victory lap for a band that has become the epicentre of the country’s hardcore revival.

If it seems like a stunning turn of events from the long drives and empty crowds of years past, rest assured Jem and the band are just as awestruck.

“Every time people have said, ‘You’re living the dream,’ it’s more than that because, man, I never ever dreamt this was in the realm of possibility.”