On the streets of south Auckland, Pasifika youth equipped with plastic siren cones have created a new sound – one that stormed TikTok, and took over a moment in pop music. Sometimes disparaged or dismissed, they say their work with sirens is more than just a sound or a hobby. It’s also about community, creativity and respite from struggle.
These are the Siren Kings – a street subculture devoted to the volume and clarity of music, channelled through the unusual vector of emergency-evacuation sirens.
Clockwise from top: Lee Heka of the Switch Hittaz siren crew, a crew of siren boys arrive at a battle in Three Kings, Mischief.C at a Centre Park siren battle. Mischief produces his own siren jams.
Devotees carefully pull apart radios and Bluetooth speakers, wiring them into industrial speakers, loudhailers and sirens, and create potent, portable arenas of sound. Their sirens are typically taped on to bikes, sometimes as many as 10 wired to the handlebars. The scene orbits around battles: fighting it out through several carefully judged rounds for the loudest, clearest sound.
Among the wider public, their excursions and battles sometimes prompt irritation, anger, or complaints to noise control and police. But the siren kings say the scene is also a space to cultivate community and an escape from negativity and prejudice.
“A lot of people criticise it,” says Mischief.C*, a teenage siren competitor from Mangere, who also produces his own music as Mizgf.C. “They think it’s something that’s useless, something that’s just annoying. But they’re not in our shoes. They don’t know our struggles or what we go through.”
“It’s us having fun at the park, keeping away from selling drugs, from getting into gangs, following the wrong path. It keeps our mind off the struggles that we go through.”
“It’s a form of our own peace,” says Purp Ci’i, who also goes as The Last Soundbender.
“The siren scene is open to everybody,” he says. “It’s strictly just to enjoy the vibe of the music.”
Ci’i says outsiders miss the positivity and joy of the siren scene. “They just look at us and automatically think it’s wrong. But it’s something that makes me happy, it’s what I like to do, keeps me away from all the bad stuff that’s going around.
The scene is devoted not only to volume, but to the purity and clarity of sound, and choosing the perfect song for the medium. One champion song is Céline Dion’s The Power of Love.
The Noizy Boy wiring up sirens to the car radio.
“That will smash anyone in a battle – that song is dangerous,” Ci’i says. “It’s an old favourite from when sirens first started.”
The siren scene was brewed in south Auckland, home to New Zealand’s largest Pasifika population, but today, its creative influence has reached into pop music and around the globe. The most famous siren beat to hit mainstream is by Jawsh 685, the Auckland schoolboy producer whose Tiktok-viral melody Laxed Siren Beat became Jason Derulo’s enormous hit Savage Love. Siren jams are their own genre, Ci’i says.
Jacob Brown started filming the siren scene back in 2016, and is co-director of the documentary Young and … A Siren King, released this week. Over time, he says, the scene has increasingly begun to influence the mainstream, producing its own generation of producers and musical vocabulary.
“That sound is unique, and it comes from making sounds for a siren that can only play treble. It’s created an actual sound that’s crossed over into pop music,” Brown says.
Researchers have found south Auckland is subject to a high volume of negative news, including negative and racist stereotypes. The siren scene, over the years, has been the subject of complaints in the media – including allegations that sirens are stolen, connected to gang activity, or a public nuisance. A number of the siren boys carry around pocket-fulls of receipts to demonstrate they’ve legally bought their sirens, in anticipation of being stopped by police.
More than anything, they say, they’d like their own space – to battle undisturbed, and without disturbing others.
A siren crew make their way to a battle at Three Kings, Auckland.
“They’ve only seen the negative come out from the media and they feel really hurt by that – because they’re trying really hard to do something that they love, and it’s not harming anybody,” says Young and … A Siren King film-maker Ursula Williams. “Sure it’s loud – but so are motorbikes, so are people who drive around in hot-rods.”
“Catching up for battles, it’s always a good vibe,” says Nons.C, who has been crowned Siren King. “Instead of going against each other in the streets, we build a bond with other neighbourhoods.”
“For me, it is also a story about gentrification,” says Brown. “All these kids are in areas that are being highly gentrified, and to me it’s like: “We’re still here!” – the noise of a siren.”
“It’s a way to be heard.”
*Siren boys interviewed for this story agreed to be identified by their crew pseudonym
