“I need a few seconds for my brain to warm up.”
After waiting a couple of minutes for Speed frontman Jem Siow to jump on a Zoom call, he called in from Melbourne, Australia, using his mobile phone. With a grogginess in his voice, he apologized for his tardiness and confessed that he slept through his alarm. He seemed starkly personable compared to the image of the tough-as-nails vocalist he embodies in Speed, the beatdown Australian hardcore group.
The band is about halfway through its Australian tour supporting its debut album, “ONLY ONE MODE,” on Flatspot Records in the U.S. and Last Ride Records in Australia and will soon kick off their North American tour with a stop at the Observatory in Santa Ana on Friday, Sept. 13. The night before our interview, Speed performed at an all-ages show in Melbourne, which Siow mentioned he was still recovering from. But, he’s also processing what it’s been like returning to the band’s home base.
“It’s been crazy and seems so profound because the shows in Australia are probably the third time we have played here in over a year,” he said. “We spent so much time touring overseas, touring with Knocked Loose, and releasing our first album that we haven’t even really played in Australia. The impact of it all just really hit home.”
There isn’t a major hardcore scene in Australia, and Speed, comprised of Siow, Aaron Siow (bass), Josh Clayton (guitar), Dennis Vichidvongsa (guitar), and Kane Vardon (drums), didn’t ever anticipate much success outside of their local fanbase, which Siow says was never a worry for them. They played music because they loved it, not for the fame or notoriety. However, in 2021, during the pandemic era when people who longed for music could only interact through social media, they released a music video for their song, “We See U.” Their message of community spread like wildfire and went viral.
“Speed was like a cannonball, and social media was the cannon,” Siow said. “Putting out that video was such a life-changing moment, and it happened online. We went from sharing our music that no one knew about one day, released that video one morning, and 24 hours later, the whole hardcore world and everyone we ever looked up to for the last 15-17 years was giving us props.”
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The group has now toured the U.S., U.K. and Southeast Asia and has received nods from hardcore heavyweights Drain, Knocked Loose, Trapped Under Ice and from other fans like Post Malone and Travis Barker, whose wife Kourtney Kardashian made a post wearing Barker’s Speed jersey.
When they saw the post on social media, he said the group couldn’t believe it and laughed because they never imagined someone with that much celebrity mainstream fame would sport their merchandise. They understand she may not be a fan, but they know that Barker is, having spent time with him on several occasions.
“The guy is a legend, and from my interactions, he is a genuine and real deal kind of guy who loves the music,” Siow said. “Six or seven years ago, he was messaging our friends Ill Natured, a heavy hardcore band in a small part of Australia, asking how to buy their vinyl. This guy really cares about hardcore.”
Before their upward trajectory and nods from mainstream celebrities, Siow and his friends formed Speed as a pastime and had many conversations about how the genre was dwindling in Australia. Audiences at shows looked increasingly slimmer over the years leading up to the pandemic. The band was also concerned with the lack of kids coming to their shows, given that the genre is often driven by youthful energy on full display in mosh pits and stage diving.
For members like Siow, hardcore music provided a space where he thrived in his teens, so he wanted to be sure that today’s youth had a similar community to which they could turn. When he was 12 years old, he bought a Parkway Drive CD at a JB Hi-Fi, the Australian equivalent of Best Buy. After hearing the band was in town, he copped tickets to the show that featured three hardcore bands, Jungle Fever, Stronghold and Her Nightmare and felt an instant connection.
“It was the first time I ever saw other people that looked like normal people, like me or like friends at school, while they were playing on stage,” he said. “They weren’t doing theatrics or dressed up in costumes. They were just normal people playing primitive music.”
Speed, along with drill and rap group ONEFOUR and other artists, represents a new wave of music coming out of Australia, whose culture was once represented in the West by the likes of AC/DC and cultural exports like “Crocodile Dundee.” Siow attributes some of this new direction to the blending of cultures caused by the migration patterns of the 1980s, which brought families from Southern Asia, Japan, the Middle East and Europe.
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“What you’re seeing now in the 2000s and 2020s is a rise of first-generation communities which is a unique lived experience here,” Siow said. “I think we are also in a time where Australian artists are exploring more niche identities from across the country, which has been inspiring for artists, in general, to carve out their own place in the world and tell their own stories that haven’t been told or exported in the past by other Australians. Whether that’s telling that story through food or music, it shows the world that Australia has a diverse and largely developed community that is more recognized nowadays.”
Siow said that the group could have been pegged as the token Asian hardcore band because there weren’t that many groups in the scene who carried the same image. Vichidvongsa is a first-generation Laotian Australian, and he and his bassist brother are Chinese-Malaysian Australians. But despite having a different ethnicity and heritage, Siow said that in his own personal experience, he never felt different from his peers growing up in a large Caucasian community because hardcore music was the binding factor, something that he’s realizing is part of a grander worldwide movement.
“One of the most exciting things about hardcore right now is its global nature, its existence in cultures worldwide, and how it uniquely thrives in these different communities,” he said. “Hardcore is about championing your individuality and putting that out there as authentically as possible. People understand our message, which is just about the commonality of man, and we’re trying to celebrate that.”
Speed
Where: The Observatory, 3503 S Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana.
When: Friday, Sept. 13.
Tickets: $37 at Livenation.com.
