Speed once felt inert.
When the Sydney hardcore heroes started, there seemed to be no path forward to a full-fledged livelihood. "Within the realm of possibility, we didn't see any way of investing into the band full time and that not just leading to feeling disenfranchised," says guitarist Josh Clayton.
"Because we saw every single band that we witnessed around us who had gone full time," he continues. "There was no tangible way to do that without it becoming work and without all of the joy of it being like a true creative outlet being sucked out of it."
That life force is not to be tampered with — and it's captured in the title of their new album, Only One Mode, out July 12. To Speed's vocalist, Jem Siow, the title connotes "finding your people, finding yourself, and going hard as f— with the things you believe in, the convictions that you have in mind, whatever they may be."
Long story short, that inertia was fleeting. A key 2022 appearance at the kingmaking hardcore festival Sound and Fury burst them out of their continental bubble. Those in the know have been watching Speed put Sydney evermore on the hardcore map; now, with Only One Mode on the precipice of release, that flag might be irreversibly planted.
Read on for an interview with Siow and Clayton about the themes of Only One Mode, the band's sudden hurtle into the stratosphere, fighting dilution in the hardcore scene, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
How would you describe the dynamics of the Sydney hardcore scene, as opposed to other hardcore scenes around the world?
Siow: Sydney, and Australian hardcore in general, has never really been a globally recognized scene. It's not a really scene that has a super long history or one that has as much depth as some of the more popular scenes like New York or Boston, for example.
With Speed, it was really important that we claim Sydney hardcore from the very beginning. When Josh and I and the rest of Speed got into hardcore, we were like 12 or 13. In the mid-2000s, hardcore was really almost at its peak, because of the boom of Parkway Drive — Australia's biggest heavy export and biggest hardcore band at the time.
When it got to around 2018, 2019, for the five years or so leading up to that, the whole scene on this side of the world really dwindled — where it went from having thousands of people across Sydney go to shows in the years prior, to maybe only just about a hundred or 150 people left.
Because of that filtering out of the crowd, I feel like we were left with the people who were like the lifers, the people who really cared about it for all the right reasons, enough to stick around. We found that we [needed to] band together and put our heads together, put our differences aside — whatever slight differences there were — and worked together to rebuild the scene, and push and reinvigorate the culture again.
Sydney hardcore, to us, isn't really branded or defined by a certain musical style. It's more of a collective attitude to work together. That commonality between us is the love and passion for hardcore, the relationships and the experiences that it's given us.
I think that's the brand of Sydney right now. It's very inclusive. It's very welcoming for the people who see it for the right reasons. We're bound together by a common mentality of wanting the best for the scene and wanting the best for each other, which is bringing up the new generation and supporting all the new bands and the new people who are being involved.
Clayton: If you zoom in on Sydney, it has its own very unique cultural context, at least for our generation. It's unique, not just to the world, but to Australia specifically.
Because, for most of the 2010s — I think it was for about 10 years — there were some laws in place in Sydney that basically strangled its nightlife. That left an entire generation of young people in Sydney without much of a cultural identity, I think. There weren't a lot of opportunities for creative communities to really flourish in the face of that.
I think [people were forced to] sit on the fringes and create their own communities. I think that has set the table for the era that we're in at the moment, where a lot of that stuff has been walked back. But, also, I think it's left our generation with a really strong appetite to create their own scenes, and given a lot of young people in Sydney a really strong DIY ethic.
That really set the table for hardcore to come back to Sydney in a strong way. Because, [hardcore is] naturally so DIY. So, I think a lot of people have gravitated towards hardcore or adjacent communities that have a lot of overlap with hardcore. That, I think, is what sets Sydney hardcore apart.
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You guys have mentioned that Speed's mission is to promote Australian hardcore culture. Drill into that more.
Clayton: Historically, hardcore comes from North America. If you ask somebody their favorite hardcore bands, 99 percent of them are going to be North American hardcore bands from the '80s onwards. Australia has never really made a significant splash in the international hardcore community because, with most of the scene existing within North America, people don't really tend to look outside of those borders.
We've always had this massive underdog mentality because the idea of being able to be a globally recognized hardcore band or a globally recognized hardcore scene is such a lofty ambition. It's never really been done before. We can count on one to two hands, I guess, how many Australian bands have ever even made it over to America to play.
So, for us, it's always been this huge ambition to try and push that forward and make Australian hardcore familiar to people all around the world. Because hardcore is such a global thing. We witnessed it firsthand. We've seen how hardcore exists in Europe and how it exists in Asia. We've met so many people around the world who've interpreted hardcore as a culture and put it within their own environment.
A lot of those stories get lost a lot of the time because the dominant culture just exists where it exists. That's been something that we've pushed really hard to change and wanted to be the flag bearers for Australian hardcore. Because there is so much unique stuff that exists here. There are so many labels. There are so many awesome bands.
Our entire experience of hardcore is informed by the bands that we saw growing up who were all Australian. We could have told you 20 Australian hardcore bands when we were 15, but probably only five American ones, because we were just so focused on what was happening in our backyard.
I think that's why that's been such a strong agenda for us, is because it's so special to us. We just want to share it with everybody else in the world.
Take us through the period between 2022's Gang Called Speed EP and Only One Mode.
Siow: For the band as a seven inch was approached as our holy grail. When we started the band, we didn't see beyond the seven inch. It was just, "We'll do a seven inch after the demo, and that's it." With that in mind, especially riding that seven inch during Covid, that was written to be played and written for 200 people or so.
But, the month after that record was released, we played at Australia's biggest hardcore festival, Back On The Map. And, it was coming out of Covid, and it was 800 people sold out, all-Australian hardcore lineup only. It was the most insane show that we'd seen in over a decade.
I think that that show really marked, historically, a turning point and the renaissance of Australian hardcore here. But then, also, two weeks after that, we were flown over to play [Los Angeles'] Sound and Fury 2022, which was not only the biggest hardcore festival in the world, but it was also three times the size it had ever been coming out of Covid. It was like 6,000 people.
That was our 15th show. For us to be flown over to play a show like that, it was almost laughable between our friends how insane this kind of opportunity was. To go over there and play in front of this many people and have a set like we did was completely earth-shattering for us. It was beyond any dream we'd ever, ever, ever conceived.
This is like 6,000 people beating the s— out of each other, going into an absolute war zone, to an Australian band in the middle of the day on a Saturday over there. That completely just changed our lives multiple times in that one show, Sound and Fury.
After that, I think it just completely altered the trajectory of what we thought was possible with this band.
Two Only One Mode songs that jumped out at me were "Kill Cap" and "Caught in a Craze." Can you talk about those?
Siow: The title of "Kill Cap" is a bit of a play on words. A good friend of ours from Sydney runs a brand called Killjoy. And, he had a hat that says, "Kill," on the front of the cap. It kind of, in some ways, becomes anonymous with Speed because we'd worn it so much around.
But, in the context of this song, "Kill Cap" is actually short for killing capacity. And, it's a song about suicide, because we've all lost friends and important ones in our life over the years to this.
Clayton: To me, "Kill Cap "is maybe the most unique Speed song of all, lyrically. From my assessment, every other Speed song is so confident in the message that it sends. It's so strong. This is how we feel, this is what we think. Take from that what you will.
Whereas, "Kill Cap" I think is a really open-ended song where it doesn't have an answer. It's a song that's just like, "This is a f—ed up thing that we've all experienced, and we don't know what else to say about it except that it hurts." You know what I mean? I think that it's easily the most vulnerable Speed song.
Siow: "Caught in a Craze," the last song on the record, was written with a direct awareness of our context, especially in the last two years and how things have changed.
It is an incredible feeling and position to be in when many people have referred to us as their gateway band into hardcore. Hardcore, right now in 2024, is arguably the biggest it's ever been, which is an incredible thing. But, the avenues and the pathways in which people have found the space, it's very different to how we did when we were kids.
This is not on some jaded s— to say it needs to go back to the old way. But, Josh and I didn't find out about going to shows via TikTok or through seeing a celebrity talk about it or make a joke about it in some way, or wear some merch.
We found out about this because we went to our local record store and there was a flyer that pointed us in the right direction. And then, from that show, found out about another flyer. And, met people there and kept coming back and kept coming back over years and years and years, and learned about the culture through observing the etiquette and through participating.
For the last five to 10 years in Australia, it's been how do we get kids to come to shows? How do we get more people to come to shows? How do we make people feel the same way we do about hardcore? Now, coming out of Covid, the question snapped quickly to, Wait, how do we make sure this s— doesn't get diluted?
Because, there's almost too many people coming to shows now who aren't really getting it for the right reasons. So, "Caught in a Craze" is really about that. It's people who are caught in this craze, who are seeing this kind of spectacle and digesting hardcore on a superficial level, seeing it as being maybe just this violent spectacle or this new trend of the moment.
That's really normal. That happens a lot of the time, and that's OK. It's just through a filtration process; the right ones will generally stick around. But, I think that this song is really acknowledging our awareness of that.
There are a lot of people as well — we'll call them vultures from the mainstream market — who are trying to f—ing capitalize on this s— or capitalize on the moment.
We, as a band, see that, and we are navigating that, and we're keeping a close eye on all the newcomers that are trying to take what they can from the space.