Interview: SPEED (AUS) Debut Aotearoa New Zealand Tour

The first Australian hardcore group to play at Coachella and winners of the 2024 ARIA Award for Best Hard Rock or Heavy Metal Album, SPEED’s debut tour of Aotearoa New Zealand starts today. Touring their latest EP All My Angels, the Sydney five-piece will be rampaging through Pōneke, Tāmaki Makaurau and Kirikiriroa in the coming days, including a headline slot at the legendary Hamtown Smakdown festival. Interviewer Lucia Taylor got on the line with guitarist Dennis “D-Cold” Vichidvongsa for a chat about what SPEED have been up to, where they’re going, Asian Australian representation in hardcore, and more…

SPEED Aotearoa Tour 2026

Tuesday 14th July – Massey University Block 1, Wellington (all-ages)

Wednesday 15th July – Meow, Wellington○

Friday 17th July – Double Whammy, Auckland

Saturday 18th July – Hamtown Smakdown 2026, Meteor Theatre, Hamilton (all-ages)

Sunday 19th July – Last Place, Hamilton

Tickets on sale HERE via UTR

*Hamtown Smakdown tickets on sale HERE via UTR

○Info HERE

Lucia Taylor: With most of the hardcore bands I interview, especially because it’s often seen as such an angry genre, I really like to talk about how it advocates for community and friendship and how it can champion diversity and is actually such a beautiful thing. How has that community element of hardcore helped form SPEED, and also how do you continue to amplify that through your work?

D-Cold: Yeah we’re all about bringing the community together, especially in our own city. We make sure a lot of the time when we are booking a show there is a diverse lineup, whether it’s members of other bands with transgender people or POCs and all that.

It’s also such a beautiful way of forming friendships, and I know that you guys talk about that often, too. What does that mean to you?

Personally, the number one thing is friendship. Because everything I have in my life and everything and everyone I love in my life has something to do with, is always connected to, hardcore. Whether it’s like anything outside of hardcore that I love, whether it’s my hobbies or whatever, it always reverts back to hardcore for some reason. That’s how it is.

Despite forming in 2019, your rise to fame was pretty intense after the release of Only One Mode (in 2024). What was that experience like, jumping from your local scene to suddenly touring with Turnstile, playing Coachella, etcetera?

When SPEED started back in the end of 2019, just before the whole pandemic, we never had any intentions to become a full-time band. We were really focused on just being a band in our scene back home. The rise with SPEED, I think a lot of people were stuck in their homes and then it kind of gave us a boost. There’s a bunch of bands from that post-COVID era that blew up, and a lot of bands got to make it their career almost. Because in hardcore, it was never about being big or reaching that status, especially in the mainstream. A lot of people nowadays are drawn towards hardcore.

What would you attribute the resurgence of hardcore at that time to?

To be honest, I couldn’t really say. Post-pandemic, hardcore just blew up. Pre-that, (if) you were getting 100 to 200 people a show that was decent. But nowadays that’s a normal show.

Through your songs, there are quite a few like samples that I always really enjoy. How do you go about selecting them?

The samples that we have, like there’s a Bruce Lee one… If we resonate to it and it sounds like it fits, we’ll use it. Most of the samples that we use are from quotes we might have heard from an interview or something. We feel like we resonate with that, it’s like all right, we’re gonna put that in.

Are they usually aligned to the song itself or just like the greater ethos of the band?

More of the ethos of the band. Most of the time it has nothing to do with the song.

This will be your first time playing in New Zealand. What are you most excited for, and what can people expect from the shows?

We’re playing Hamtown Smakdown, I’m excited for that. I’m excited for all the shows. It’s been a long time coming. Even though we’re close to New Zealand, we never found the time to get there. A lot of people have been messaging us like, “When are you gonna come to New Zealand?” Expect a lot of high-energy.

You’ve done a lot of touring in a short amount of time. What are some of the highlights?

There’s a lot actually. Playing Coachella. That was a fun experience. It was definitely not something that we were wanting to do, it’s not something we were chasing, but we ended up doing it anyway. That was cool. There were just a bunch of tours that we did, including the Turnstile tour.

Getting to play ‘Birds’ with them looked so cool.

Yeah, that kind of shifted us into a different audience, like playing to a different crowd. What Turnstile is now compared to what they were, their crowd has definitely changed a lot, which put us in front of a new audience pretty much. So that was a big one for us. And there’s a bunch of other ones as well, like playing Outbreak (festival in Manchester), that was a cool one.

Our most recent one that we just did, the Asia and Southeast Asia tour, that was a really sentimental tour we did. SPEED went there in 2023, but this was like the most shows that we have ever done inside of Asia. I think 19 shows in a span of a month. It was a really cool experience.

I’m sure audiences really resonated with that, obviously with your lyrical content, but also the representation within a genre that can lean pretty white at times.

100%. I feel representation does matter in that sense. If they see a bunch of quote-unquote Asian men on stage playing that kind of music, if I can inspire someone from the same background to do the same, then that’s my job.

Yeah a job well done. Diversifying the scene further, it’s awesome to be playing a part in that.

Absolutely, for a long time in the hardcore scene — in Australia anyway — there weren’t many Asian people. Nowadays, there’s a lot. It’s good to be able to represent for other people.