A Long Chat with Speed, Australia’s Breakthrough Hardcore Heroes

Back in early 2020, the Australian hardcore band Speed was still playing songs from their ten-minute-long demo tape and packing a couple hundred kids into small, sweaty rooms scattered around Sydney. Then the world shut down, and the band waited. Two years later, Speed landed at the Sound and Fury Festival in Los Angeles and detonated their brand of absolute hardcore in front of some 5,000 showgoers. It was one of those weekend-defining performances people wouldn’t stop talking about, and it nudged the quintet toward the center of contemporary hardcore.

When Speed’s debut album, Only One Mode, arrived in 2024, it sent the band spinning around the globe with nonstop touring and earned them an ARIA Award (essentially the Australian equivalent of a Grammy). This year, they followed that success up with more headlining runs, as well as a coveted slot supporting Turnstile on a massive, genre-spanning tour, with crowds at some shows swelling to more than 13,000 people. Speed went from a local band to a global one at a breakneck pace. But through milestone after milestone, the guys made sure they kept proudly waving the flag of Sydney hardcore.

The band’s latest release—a three-song EP titled All My Angels, which dropped last month via Flatspot Records—sounds both fiercely local and impossibly wide at the same time. It was a record born from loss and loyalty, and it manages to capture such a precise moment in the band’s trajectory. With simple and powerful language, the EP’s title track traces what it means to love a friend and then lose him. It tells us about how grief can swallow you whole and yet, somehow, you still move forward. The EP is a capstone achievement from a year that has given the band some of its highest highs and lowest lows.

GQ linked up with vocalist Jem Siow and guitarist Joshua Clayton to talk about Speed’s sky-shot ascent, the place of individualism within hardcore’s collective heartbeat, and how the band made a record that doubles as an intensely personal portrait of loss, memory, and carrying on.

GQ: All My Angels takes the Speed sound and pushes it forward. What was your mindset when it came to writing new songs after the full-length?

Joshua Clayton: The thing about being a band where our whole thing is waving the flag for hardcore and being a 100% pure hardcore band is that the style can be quite limiting if you let it. You know what I mean? When Only One Mode [Speed’s debut album] came out last year, the intention was to put out a pure hardcore LP. That’s been something we’ve deliberately followed. We had this idea that people were looking at us as a band that had gone beyond hardcore without even trying to. We were starting to get all these opportunities outside the world of hardcore. There was this perception that we were outgrowing [the hardcore scene], so we wanted to reinforce that we are a hardcore band and that this is all we are ever going to be.

When it came to writing this new EP, it was like, “Okay, we still need to maintain that sense of identity.” We still needed to sound like we always have, but we wanted to push the envelope a little. What else is in the palette? What else can we draw from to develop this sound a little bit more? Because if we wrote another three tracks that sounded like they could have been on the LP, then we’re not really moving forward. It was very intentional on our part to progress and bring in some different elements.