Hippies are bad people pretending to be good and punks are good people pretending to be bad, or so the saying goes. But Jem Siow and Josh Clayton, singer and guitarist of the Sydney hardcore band Speed, aren’t pretending to be anything. Their embodiment of hardcore is absolute.

“People think we’re pretending or we’re playing characters in [our] videos. A layman can see a video of a hardcore set and think, ‘oh, it’s so f---ing violent, so macho, so toxic’,” says Siow. “Really, hardcore is a platform for us to channel the aggression, the negative feelings that we have bottled up deep down, and let us express them in a positive way, and share them with other people who are feeling a similar experience.”

This unrelenting belief in hardcore’s power to transmogrify transgression into positivity has made Speed Australian hardcore’s international standard-bearers. They’ve drawn massive crowds at heavy music festivals including Manchester’s Outbreak and Los Angeles’ Sound and Fury, as seen in the video for the single Don’t Need.

Hardcore’s outsider aversion has concealed the fact that Speed is one of the country’s most hyped musical exports in years. That lowprofile is unlikely to last. Their debut album Only One Mode entered ARIA’s albums chart at No.10 last week, and it topped ARIA’s Australian albums chart for the week, too.

“I think it’s by design. Hardcore is a counter-cultural thing. It has a very strict, although unspoken, code of ethics around it. I think that to be fully entrenched in hardcore culture, you position yourself as an outsider on purpose,” says Clayton. Hardcore emerged in the late ’70s as punk’s art school set moved on to new wave’s synthesisers and those that remained doubled down on the politics, riffs and ruckus.

Siow, 31, discovered heavy music in his early teens via the Byron Bay metalcore band Parkway Drive. He’d return home from gigs, black eyed and musked with mayhem, to his Chinese-Malaysian-Australian parents.

“Mum was f---ing shitting her pants, to be honest,” Siow says, impishly. “There was this trend called ‘headwalking’. You’re stage diving but you’re trying to step on as many heads and get as deep as you can. Me being in the first row and being really small, I was being headwalked literally every show.”

‘Any other Asian parent will be telling you to go and do your maths homework, but I’m going to tell you to go write some riffs’.

The advice frontman Jem Siow received from his father at 15

The writing was on the wall and his parents could only provide encouragement. At 15, his father sat him down for a two-hour talk about his future.

“They knew that it was something profound for me,” says Siow. “He said to me: ‘any other Asian parent right now will be telling you to go and do your maths homework, but I’m going to tell you to go to your bedroom and just write some riffs’.”

That night, Siow picked up the phone, called his mates and formed the band Endless Heights. They were together for 12 years and toured internationally. In 2019, he roped his younger brother Aaron into forming Speed (Aaron had never played an instrument before, landing on bass) with Clayton and Dennis Vichidvongsa on guitar and drummer Kane Vardo. Vichidvongsa and Vardo are also first-generation Australians, with Laotian and Indian heritage respectively.

“This is the first [time] I’ve been the singer and able to express lyrical themes,” says Siow. “With that obviously comes a lot of introspection. [It has been] this journey of identity, finding oneself, finding my place in this world. It’s an experience [we] share as first generation Asian Australians. We’ve channelled this sense of identity into the band. For me at least, this is the first time I’ve really accepted myself.”

In 2021, Speed uploaded the track We See You to YouTube – a blistering one minute and eight seconds packed with an airhorn, tambourine and a sample of the dive bomb guitar opening Canadian pro-wrestler Bret Hart’s theme song. Siow says Sydney hardcore had waned from a mid-2000s boom of localised scenes in suburbs across the city to just a few hundred fans. But when We See You dropped, fans lost their minds.

“Overnight, every single band that we ever looked up to in America embraced us. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it was literally like that in the 48 hours following putting out that video,” says Clayton. “It was the most surreal thing. It felt like a dream. All of these people who we’d always wanted the validation of had turned around and embraced what we were doing.”

Producers were trying to rope them into rap collaborations and companies wanted to co-opt their buzz. Two EPs followed: 2020 Flex, then Gang Called Speed in 2022. They picked up fans in Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and wife Kourtney Kardashian. Hardcore this was not, but the band has doggedly protected the genre’s spirit. Album closer Caught in a Craze is a rebuke of genre tourists.

The album’s title, Only One Mode, refers to approaching life with unwavering vigour.

Hardcore’s rigid hallmarks are all there: uncompromising heaviness, melody-averse riffs, rhythmic intensity, minor scales, the distinctive vocal “bark” (Siow corrects me when I call it a growl). But it’s also a misnomer for an album packed with texture, subtle humour and emotional nuance.

Only One Mode has a Bruce Lee sample, ’90s R&B inspirations and DJ scratches. Siow opens the whole mad thing with two flute notes that hang like pregnant thunder clouds (he has studied the instrument classically and taught it for 14 years). Only Foes speaks to how marginalisation’s toxicity can be internalised then projected outwards. The First Test suggests self-acceptance lies in supportive communities who share your experience.

“With nowhere to hide, find peace being truthful,” roars Siow on the track.

Siow’s sincerity is engrossing. He speaks in long, passionate trains of thought. But he falters when discussing the track Kill Cap – a meta reference to a friend’s clothing brand, KILLJOY, specifically a hat emblazoned with the word “Kill” that the band wears, and a dedication to their friend, Alex Arthur, who died last year, along with others in the scene who have died, too. The conversation’s energy is momentarily suffocated.

“The greatest challenge I’ve ever had in my life is dealing with suicide. It has affected me and my friends and my family,” says Siow. “Kill Cap is short for the term killing capacity. What is your capacity to kill? What leads you there? What can we do to fix this? I don’t know.” Both men stare at the ground.

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Maybe the band is already practising a solution. Only One Mode’s vulnerability is bracing and courageous, strength from emotional transparency. It’s a love letter to the hardcore community and to the band itself, a unit forged from ever-deepening mateship, loyalty and support. Album opener Real Life Love is a north star to follow beyond the album’s conclusion.

“This relationship that I have with my friends here in Sydney is this kind of friendship that knows no words. We can read each other, we know each other so deeply,” says Siow. “The idea of real-life love – this unconditional love, understanding and acceptance that we have between us – is the whole value that we’re trying to embody in this band.”

Speed’s Only One Mode is out now. They will perform at Brisbane’s Princess Theatre on August 22; Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on August 23; Melbourne’s Stay Gold on August 29; Adelaide’s UniBar on August 31; and Perth’s Magnet House on September 1.

If you or someone you know is in need of support contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue.

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