What does hardcore mean to you? Aggressive or heavy music that contains the conventions of fast tempos, power chord driven guitar riffs, and brash screaming vocals? Or is it something more emotional— lyrics that cry out for political change and expel anger, pain and sadness? For Sydney bred hardcore band Speed, it’s all those things and more.
“I was filling in drumming for a band with a bunch of friends,” shares drummer Kane Vardon. “I’d seen Jem (Siow, vocalist) there, we’d been friends for years already, but I hadn’t seen him for a while. I asked him what’s been happening, he said he’d been writing hardcore and working on a demo and I was like, ‘oh sick well if you need a drummer, I’m kind of trying to drum more in bands.’” He explains that, at the time, the Sydney hardcore scene had dwindled to a desolate level, which only gave more fuel to the band’s fire, and they got the ball rolling with Siow’s demos as a launching pad.
The band’s first official EP, A Gang Called Speed, was released in 2022 followed up by their debut album, Only One Mode, in July of last year. Returning to the short punch in the gut of an EP, All My Angels, is out now via Flatspot Records.
“Only One Mode was about just planting our flag of who we are and how we sound,” Siow says. “Because Speed started out in a time when hardcore was so small in Australia, we were very conscious that the literacy for hardcore was very low and so we were very intentional about branding our ethos and making sure that people knew we were a hardcore band so that when they saw the way we do things, when they see the way we perform, the way we engage, the way we handle everything they know how a hardcore band operates.”
For Speed, hardcore is more than the sonic elements within their music. The way they look at it, hardcore is larger than themselves. It’s about the music they make of course, but also who they make it with, who they tour with, and their community of friends that inform everything they do.
“When we say hardcore, I see the image of all my best friends. I see us growing up, meeting at shows, going to venues hours away from our house,” Siow describes. “I think a lot of us thought that it would be this phase, I think we thought it would be this teenage thing but as we got older and older we’ve made so many more friends, so many more powerful experiences that have made us who we are, it is, aside from any kind of trope or generalization or corniness it is literally our lives, it’s our whole spirit, our whole being.”
With All My Angels, the band further emphasizes their appreciation for the deep connections they’ve found through hardcore music as well as the losses that they’ve endured since their last release. “In between writing Only One Mode and All My Angels, we had three close friends pass away within the span of a year and a half. It’s been this very interesting, almost surreal experience because we are going through such a transformative time in our lives…one day you’re literally playing the biggest show of your life then the next day you’re grieving your friend, it’s been this really crazy experience of very extreme emotions,” Siow says. He explains how the loss of their friends Aje, Thamid, and Arthur was the main inspiration for the EP as well as a dedication to them and all they brought to their hardcore family.
“All My Angels is us not having all the answers to every question for once, I don’t know what happens to everyone when they pass away, we’re figuring things out as we go and the way we feel we should proceed is to keep pursuing their image and keep carrying their name and exporting their message in place of them because we just feel that we’re the lucky ones that we were able to know them.”
All My Angels is out now, and you can order it from Flatspot Records. Follow Speed on Instagram and Twitter for future updates.
