SPEED is a hardcore band from Sydney, Australia, that has garnered a cult following within pockets of the hardcore scenes around the world, to the point of landing a placement on the Coachella 2025 lineup. Known for their eclectic style and influence, SPEED channels high energy, abrasive instrumentation, and positive vibes through their music, which resonates not only with hardcore fans but also with music enthusiasts of all walks of life.

Before taking to the stage for their weekend 2 performance at Coachella, mxdwn was able to catch up with Jem Siow (lead vocals, flute) and Josh Clayton (rhythm guitar, backing vocals) from SPEED to talk about how receptive the crowds at Coachella have been to hardcore music, the expectations they had when starting the band, and how they hope to inspire the Australian hardcore scene.

Greg: First of all, congratulations on playing Coachella. How has it been so far?
Josh: It’s been sick. It’s been a very new experience for us. I don’t think any of us have been to an event of this scale before. We brought a bunch of our close friends and partners and everything just to share the experience with, see a bunch of stuff that we don’t get to see at home. The show last week was awesome too, so we had a good time.

Greg: Has there been anything surprising that you guys have seen? Any acts that blew you away?
Jem: I’m not a K-Pop fan at all. My girlfriend is. But I took the opportunity with the fucking VIP pass that we have to get close and just experience it. I walked up and saw ENHYPEN on the Sahara stage last week and that production, and seeing that shit super close, up front. Also there weren’t as many people as I thought because I think this is a different environment for them. But seeing that up close with that level of production over your head, the crazy lights, the giant video and everything was actually fire. That surprised me.

Greg: That’s cool. Was it influencing a lot of what you were doing? When you saw that, were you like, “Oh, maybe I should incorporate this K-Pop stuff into my set?”
Jem: No, not at all. But it was just a dope experience.
Josh: We’re going to get some backup dancers.
Jem: We’re going to get some backup dancers and some lip-singing.
Josh: I guess we kinda do have backup dancers already.

Greg: Well, speaking of a different environment, I feel like hardcore at a festival like Coachella is very different. And just watching the live streams last week, the crowd was very receptive. How did that feel seeing them gravitating towards your music?
Josh: It’s awesome. We stick out like a sore thumb on this. It’s obvious this is not a hardcore show at all. But it was very surprising to see people try to engage with it and understand what it was. Especially because there’s so many different things going on. There’s seven different stages all in operation at the same time, so people are just walking in and out as they poke their head in, watching a song or two. So for us, to be able to play in an environment like that and people receive it, react to it, respond to it, and want to participate, I think it’s a big success.

Greg: When you’re playing a show that isn’t necessarily geared towards hardcore music, what do you see in the crowd to gauge that they’re being open and welcoming to the music? Is there anything you notice?
Jem: I think it’s more of an energy. If you can feel the energy being reciprocated. This music is so rudimentary. It’s literally plug and play. We literally have power chords, and guitars and drums and mics, that’s it. We don’t have any stage production. We don’t have any pyrotechnics or costumes or nothing like that. It’s us as people, so with that, the set relies purely on the passion and the energy dialed up to a thousand. So if you can feel even just a little bit of that reciprocated from an audience that knows nothing about hardcore, I think that’s a bit of success. Generally, as well, we’re pretty open-minded people. We’re hardcore kids, but are by nature open-minded people who are just out here to experience the world and what it has to offer. So if that’s reciprocated by the audience, that also is not familiar with hardcore, that’s a fucking cool thing.

Josh: I think also seeing people that clearly don’t understand it, just wanting to participate goes a long way. It looks like totally unorganized chaos, but with hardcore music, there is a specific style of dancing and there’s a specific time in the song to dance. And you can’t understand that by just walking in and seeing it. But people walk in and they see it, and they want to get involved. So anybody trying to get involved in any way I think is cool. I see people doing funny stuff and I’m like, that’s not really what we do. But the fact that you came in and want to do that is cool and shows that you appreciate this.

Greg: Coachella is such a massive festival. What do you think performing at Coachella says for hardcore music in general? What do you think having hardcore acts on such a massive festival says for the genre?
Jem: It’s definitely at an interesting and special point for the whole subculture. It’s being gleamed by the mainstream eye a lot more than it was in the last 10, 15 years. We are passionate about what we do because by chance, we stumbled across this at a young age. In our thirties now, we are so aware of the positive impact it has had on our lives. And even just labeling it as a positive impact is understating the dramatic way that it has dictated all of our relationships and perspectives of the world.

So for people who come to Coachella and have never had any kind of familiarity with this space, if they stumble across something like a band like SPEED, and there’s something about us that hooks us in, and that’s the thing that makes them find out about our influences and their influences and go down the pipeline of the journey of being a hardcore kid. Even if that only happens to 0.1% of it, that’s a cool thing. It’s the fucking best thing that’s ever happened to me. I wouldn’t change any of my experience for a single thing. I only love it more and more as I get older and that goes for the rest of everyone in SPEED. So our reaction to this is to share it.

Greg: I love that. And I feel like a band like SPEED, the message you guys bring is so positive and so inspiring to see. I feel like you guys represent the hardcore scene in such a powerful way.
Jem: Thank you. Our story shouldn’t be seen as representative of the hardcore experience for everyone and I think that’s the beauty of it, is that it’s not for everybody. It’s for anybody, but it’s not for everybody. We are just here to speak on our culture and the way that we have built a relationship with this world. And we just feel very lucky for it. So that’s what we’re trying to explore.

Greg: With touring the world and everything, I feel like you’ve seen different cultures and different pockets of music. What are some of the differences you’ve seen in different hardcore scenes around the world?
Josh: I mean, everywhere does it a little bit differently. And I think the thing about hardcore is to really participate in it, you have to show up on a local level. You can’t go to a 2000-cap show when there’s a touring band coming through once or twice a year and say that you’re really part of the hardcore scene. You need to know who the local bands are where you live, and you need to show up for them as well. And so in that sense, people’s relationship with it is super insular and it kind of manifests in different ways all across the world.

Two years ago, we played in Gothenburg in Sweden for the first time. Sweden’s had a hardcore scene for a long time, but it’s never been one that’s had a huge amount of attention from the outside. We went there with very little perspective on what we were walking into. And when we got there, the venue was a really small 150-cap room, and it was a sold out show, but at least half the crowd were under 18. That’s a very rare thing compared to where we’re from in Australia where it’s predominantly adults. And it was because throughout the Covid pandemic, being locked down, all of these young kids just discovered hardcore through the internet and they’d all just fallen in love with it. Then the people that are putting on shows there have just accepted them and put on for them and been really consistent with putting on shows and giving them a place to turn up. They all just fell in love with moshing and they would all just go to shows all the time and just mosh hard as fuck the whole time. It was just this really, really cool little tight-knit scene I haven’t really seen anywhere else in the world.

Greg: That’s so sick. And I feel like when you have those small intimate shows, it really shows not just what the culture is in those places, but it really shows how much they love music in those places and I feel like that’s so important.
Josh: And also they love just having an excuse to connect with each other. That’s what it really is about. It is having something in common that you share with people. Some people play sports, some people go to church. People do all sorts of things to try and find community. And for people like us, it’s this very specific aggressive type of music that we all wander over.

Greg: One thing I also love about SPEED, obviously it’s a hard hardcore group, but I also love that there is Asian representation too, especially on a lineup like Coachella where there’s so many different acts. I feel like that’s very important. How does it feel being a part of that intersection of two very different cultures?
Jem: It’s not something that’s at the forefront of my mind because we are who we are, and that’s just a passive part of our experience, which I’m also lucky to say. But with that being said, we are conscious of the fact that all of our influences for the biggest part sonically have come from America. The genre started here, and this is where it’s the biggest industry for hardcore in general, and it has been since the beginning. People can hear the sound of SPEED and just think that we’re American people or have a certain kind of stereotype of what we might look like. So we’re very conscious of putting who we are on show visually because I think that representation goes a long way when you can see someone that looks like you or you can see yourself in something, then you can have a pathway to get there too.

And growing up, I didn’t really have that many of those figures in this kind of space. Luckily, that didn’t inhibit me from pursuing what I wanted to pursue. But I do know that my story and the story of my relatives and other people that look like us could be slightly different if they had a little bit more opportunity or a little bit more inspiration, I guess, for lack of a better word in front of them. So that’s what we’re trying to champion. But at the end of the day, Sydney and Australia in general is very diverse. The hardcore scene is more and more diverse, and that’s just second nature to us. Growing up around people of all different cultures our whole lives, it’s just normal. So SPEED is not an Asian band or fucking whatever. We’re just an Australian hardcore band.

Greg: I love that. Are there any surprising influences that you had growing up that people probably wouldn’t expect you guys to have?
Jem: The one that we talk about the most is Parkway Drive. I don’t know if that’s unexpected. I think some people find that unexpected because they exist as this big theatrical metal band now, but their roots are in hardcore. And that’s how we found out about them because they would play hardcore shows in the mid-2000s. They inspired us because they don’t typically look like a metal band. They’re from Byron Bay, which is historically known as a tourist surfing town, yet they have literally conquered the whole world and become now one of the, not only the biggest heavy export, but one of the biggest music exports ever in Australia. Their agenda as a band was literally just to use the band as a vehicle to have a great experience and tour the world with their friends, and I see a lot of similarities in how SPEED approaches our band with how they started too.

Greg: Was that the main goal for you guys to just tour with your friends and see all different parts of the world playing music?
Josh: To be honest, not even because we didn’t, we started the band when we were approaching our thirties. And in our mind, I think a lot of the touring and traveling aspect of playing in music was behind us. We were ready to settle down and live more conventional lives, but at the same time, the hardcore scene that we came from was going through a bit of a lull, and so we felt pretty empowered to start our own band, just have a band to play some hardcore shows. But things snowballed very quickly, and I guess we had a lot of opportunities come up really early. It just opened a lot more doors for us and then has grown into that vehicle that’s become this thing that just gives an excuse to travel and spend as much time together as possible.

Greg: So you wouldn’t imagine you guys playing Coachella even when you started?
Jem: Fuck no.
Josh: We didn’t imagine playing outside of Australia, you know what I mean? It was a total fantasy. And then, yeah, Coachella is well, beyond that.
Jem: I paint this picture is that we’ve been playing in bands since we were like 14, 15, and some of our bands toured overseas. Some of them have played a couple shows in America, but none of them have been big or successful in terms of what I guess the layman would consider in a musical career. And that’s totally fine. We have lived with the acceptance that Australia is a small place and no one really cares about what we have to offer. So our scope of potential was literally what has been achieved by our friends which is what we thought. Dennis and Kane who play in SPEED, they played in another band called Relentless. They played This Is Hardcore Festival once. It was in 2013, they opened it. They played with 20 people. And even just the fact that they played This is Hardcore Festival and they opened, it was the most fucking legendary thing to all of us. And this band started SPEED, and we played Sound and Fury as our 15th show after Covid in front of 6,000 people. I can’t describe how unprecedented this entire experience is.

Now we’re at Coachella. It is such a laugh that this is happening. My brother didn’t even know how to play. I taught my brother to play bass to play in this band. The demo, if you listen to it, it’s simple on purpose, technically, so that he can learn to play it. He doesn’t know how to play any songs on the bass other than SPEED songs, and he doesn’t even know how to play all of them yet. When we got a Fender sponsorship, they were like, “What kind of bass do you want?” He goes, “I want a red one.” And when he got the second bass, they’re like, “Which one do you want?” He’s like, “Well, I want a blue one.”

We literally do this for the love of it and the fun of it without any expectation, now we’re here. I think that’s the most powerful thing that we’ve learned as friends, is that when your why and when your motivations come from a pure place, success to me is having a fucking great night with my homies and going home safe. That’s it. This all is just a fucking huge bonus. So we are just taking it for what it is, trying to stay humble and grateful and keep the egos down to the ground, and also just export the normalcy of people. We’re just normal people who aren’t better than nobody, just here having a life experience, and we’re just grateful for it.

Greg: That’s so beautiful. That was a perfect answer. I really love the new album. The album is perfect. There’s so many elements I love about it. I love the record scratching, the flute, so many different elements. Have there been any genres or any sounds that you have wanted to try to incorporate into your music but haven’t done yet?
Josh: I think ultimately, it’s been a bit of a trope for bands in heavier music or in hardcore as they get more popular, you try to commercialize the sound a little bit or make it a little bit more approachable. But we’ve always been very intentional about trying to stay well within the confines of what hardcore is. And that’s just because we started as a hardcore band, we want to end as a hardcore band. That’s all we want to do. We have no other motivations. But we’re kind of at a point now where we want to challenge that definition for ourself and still maintain those sort of boundaries of what we’ve said, but just try to be as creative as possible and try to make the music as interesting as possible. So I don’t think that necessarily would come out in terms of trying to introduce other genres or anything like that. It’s more just about how do you write the coolest riff possible? How do you write something that makes you kind of raise an eyebrow when you hear it? Oh, shit, that’s different. That’s not what I’m used to hearing from this band. But in terms of blending other genres, I don’t know if that will ever be something that we would want to do.
Jem: Those elements that you brought up, like the DJ scratching and some of the other sounds that are sprinkled throughout that is just coming from a place of our personality. We love hardcore but we’re also open-minded people who listen to a lot of music and have experienced a lot of different artistic worlds in our lifetime. So that is just kind of giving a nod to some of the humor, some of the eclectic nature of who we are as people. I think that’s the most important thing for us as artists that we try to ride by is authenticity. Everything that you hear in there is something that makes sense to us personally, and that’s why we put it in there. And we’re not afraid to do it because we know that’s who we are as people. Some of it as well is quite humorous to us. It’s just funny. In “We See U,” there’s a horn in it, there’s a dive bomb that’s sampled. It’s from a Brett Hart wrestling intro. It’s just fucking funny. That’s literally not too much more than that to it.

Greg: I love that. I love that you don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s just kind of for the love of it.
Jem: It’s just for fun. We put this sample in it because, I can’t wait until Tom Hill hears this when I sit down with him next to over lunch and play this demo to him. It’s born out of that.

Greg: That’s so sick. Well, I have one more. Obviously, you guys are playing Coachella, but what do you guys see for the future of SPEED? Is there anything you guys still want to do? Are there any goals in the foreseeable future that you guys want to accomplish?
Josh: The things that we definitely have planned in the near future is a lot of touring and more recording. So we know that we’re going to be doing that at least for the next of the while. But I think the main kind of motivation for the band at this point is fostering a bigger, healthier scene at home for hardcore. We have always said that SPEED will continue to be a band as long as there’s a need for it. We’ll feel like we’ve kind of accomplished something when there’s a really self-sustaining, awesome scene in Australia that the international hardcore community recognizes. We want to put Australian hardcore on the map, essentially. We want people to speak about Australian hardcore bands in the same breath as American hardcore bands. So that’s really what drives us the most and what we want to see in the future.

Greg: I think you guys are doing that really well, and I’m just very excited to see what you guys have coming up next.

To keep up with all news regarding SPEED including tour dates and future releases, check out their website at gangcalledspeed.com.