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Album review: State Champs – State Champs
State Champs’ fifth album finds the Albany band relishing in pop-punk’s glory years.
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State Champs: “We’re starting to find who we are as a band and the story we want to tell”
On the eve of their fifth album, State Champs are taking stock of who they are, where they’ve been and – most importantly – where they’re going. With the self-titled LP acting as something of a reset, frontman Derek DiScanio is exploring the realities and responsibilities of adulthood, and what success actually means for one of this generation’s hottest pop-punk bands…
- Words:
- David McLaughlin
- Photography:
- Josiah Van Dien
“Adult life is fucking scary!” Derek DiScanio matter-of-factly asserts as we start to get into the really good stuff.
Having recently celebrated turning the big-boy age of 32, the State Champs frontman has found himself ruminating on how almost half his time on this earth so far has been spent singing in the band. This was surely never part of the grand pop-punk plan — if indeed he or they ever troubled themselves to devise such a thing.
“Everyone else is growing up and I’m over here still thinking that I’m this young kid,” he continues, light-heartedly beating himself up for his perceived arrested development. “I’m living on my own, going through relationship stuff having recently become single, totally fending for myself and it’s frightening. Like, what the fuck am I doing? Being an adult can shock you to your core, but if you don’t face it head-on, it’s going to consume you. So, why not be open about it?”
The self-styled “grown-ass man” is possibly being a little harsh on himself, even if he does so with good cheer. His reflective mood might be somewhat explained by coming fresh off the high of an inspirational weekend in the desert, indulging in the nostalgia-fest of Las Vegas’ When We Were Young, where State Champs played their 2013 debut album The Finer Things in full. He’s evidently still tender and recovering from all the fun of performing those old songs, not to mention watching pretty much all of his favourite bands play even older songs.
“What a weekend, dude,” he enthuses wildly. “My lips are so chapped they feel like plastic, I’m probably going to be coughing up dust for a week and my ears are still ringing, but it was so worth it. The whole thing was like one big time machine for me.”
There are a few other reasons why the State Champs man might be feeling a little existential dread creeping in of late. For one, his bandmates – guitarist Tyler Szalkowski, bassist Ryan Scott Graham and drummer Evan Ambrosio – all appear to have their shit together. “Everyone's getting married, having kids, starting lives and buying houses,” the singer shares, “and I’m… not!”
There’s also the small matter of album five, not insignificantly self-titled, putting into fresh perspective just how far they’ve come.
“We’re starting to find who we are as a band and tell the story we want to tell – to find what encapsulates the sound, aesthetic and the brand that is State Champs.
“That’s something that we never really knew for so long,” he confesses. “Before it was just like, ‘Yeah, we’re fun, we’re pop-punk and we’re good at it!’ and that is still the mission statement, but we joked about how this is almost like our [version of Taylor Swift’s] Eras Tour time capsule record, aka a reason to make it self-titled. This is us and it’s the best version of us.”
“This is us and it’s the best version of us”
To figure out who they are in 2024, State Champs first had to take a long, hard and honest look at who they used to be. That meant going back and listening to their old records, analysing what they liked, appreciating the progress they’d made along the way and holding up that mirror to the reality of the here and now. In doing so, Derek was personally struck by the realisation of how much he felt had changed and how much appeared to be a work in progress.
“I think my head was a lot bigger back then,” he candidly admits of his younger self. “That kid did not know how to write a song, but he also had nothing to lose and a lot to prove. It’s been a big balance-finding exercise of, ‘How much of that little kid still lives in Derek in 2024?’ There’s still a good amount, honestly, but I have to fight [against] it as an adult now.”
One thing that definitely has changed over the years is how many more logistics are involved these days, if and when the guys want to get together and actually be a band.
Derek and Ryan both live in Los Angeles, Tyler is in Ohio, and Evan is based in Connecticut. It’s a far cry from the band’s first incarnation in 2010, growing up mere blocks away from one another in upstate New York, hopping on skateboards any time they wanted to jam in someone’s bedroom or basement.
So, the modern-day State Champs cleared their busy adult schedules and booked a much-needed catch-up at a rental property in Joshua Tree, in the Mojave desert. While there, they hung out and wrote songs for a week, allowing themselves to do so free of any expectations or pressure. There was no intention of the fruits of the trip necessarily turning into a record, let alone a definitive self-titled statement. Though only a handful of those riffs, choruses or verses might’ve made their way onto what eventually transpired as such, the time spent together would prove to be the spiritual spark that rekindled their friendship and set its wheels in motion.
“Just hanging out and having fun brought us back to our roots creating together,” Derek recalls. “That was the fuel to the fire that lit us up and made us excited about making a record. With us living in different cities and states now, we missed the brotherhood and the friendship of it all. We’ve seen some shit and we’ve let shit go to shit, but we’ve always been able to find unity in ourselves when it comes down to it – to put those pieces back together.”
Which goes some way towards explaining how this record presents itself to the world. Its cover art (and accompanying merch branding) depicts a trophy, cracked but intact, as if repaired after taking one too many bumps. That’s no accident.
“I never wanted to brand a trophy as ‘State Champs’ before, because I thought that was too on the nose. In my head that was far too low-hanging fruit. But it made sense to do it now, in the way that we have,” Derek argues. “We’ve kind of watched things fall to a mess before, and I think that’s a huge part of this new era and this self-titled album for ’Champs. As part of our mission on this record, there was an element of these real-life – adult, whatever the right term is – responsibilities, pulling people in different directions. For this album cycle, we started to really reflect on that.”
A month later, with the spectre of “bills, mortgages and pregnancies” acting as a looming backdrop to their ever-shifting dynamics, the band entered the studio in LA with producer Anton Delost (who they previously collaborated with on the Ben Barlow-featuring Kings Of The New Age highlight, Everybody But You) to resume and swiftly wrap up work on what became their next full-length. Carrying on from where they left off in the desert, the collective discovered a newfound sense of open-mindedness fuelling their efforts.
“We opened up to each other as brothers and as bandmates more than ever,” Derek reveals of the apparently breezy process. “I’m kind of a closed-off person when it comes to vulnerability and talking about things. I’m never the guy that wants to be a burden at all. But we found a way to check in on each other. The dynamic has shifted in a good way, much for the better. And that’s helped with songwriting as well. Ryan – he’s like my songwriting editor-in-chief – is like, ‘Thank God you’re finally telling me things!’”
Whisper it, but could this be a sign of the very maturity the frontman berates himself for apparently lacking?
“Well, I’ve learned that from my guys being as open as they are,” he says, pointedly redirecting any credit for it to his bandmates. “Whether it’s feeling alone, or relationship issues and stuff, I’m a lot more open about it. It was so easy for me in the past to just write songs about shitty ex-girlfriends. I can do that forever and there are still some songs like that [on this album], but I’ve been able to elaborate in a way that gives me more closure and clarity, which should also help our fans.
“Amongst those angsty, ‘Fuck you!’ songs are some really vulnerable moments about feeling super lost and lonely, which I’ve never done before,” he confesses. “Songs like Too Late To Say and Golden Years go back to that real-life thing of growing up and becoming an adult. There’s songs about being in a weird place, not knowing where you’re going in life and being okay with that.”
Though the self-styled “baby of the band” is evidently starting to feel the pinch of time and some pressure to catch up with his peers, he’s kind enough to himself to allow for the reality that everyone’s journey through life is different. He can even laugh about it occasionally.
“I’m taking my sweet-ass time over here!” he says with a wry chuckle, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses and ever-present baseball cap for comfort. “Living on my own here in LA, that’s my new step. I feel like I have so much youth left in me and I still don’t know what the fuck I’m doing sometimes. That’s the big battle with us as a band right now, too, I guess. It’s like: real life adulthood meets passion, love and creativity.”
The kicker is that if you ever do get to thinking you’ve got life all figured out, the universe has a way of letting you know you don’t know a damn thing. State Champs are no strangers to that phenomenon.
“You do still get smacked in the face by stuff that you never thought was going to happen,” the frontman accepts. “The opening track on this record, The Constant, is about us being screwed over in the music industry, and finding unity within ourselves to say, ‘Well, fuck you! We're going to do it ourselves and find our way back to what makes us us.’”
“I feel like I have so much youth left in me and I still don’t know what the f*ck I’m doing sometimes”
Without getting into the mess of specifics, Derek alludes to past decisions biting them in the ass. He talks of leaving money on the table in negotiations, making the wrong calls on rollouts, and being “lazy” when it comes to the business of being in the band.
But no more. Not now that the stakes are much higher. If bandmates are expected to spend precious time away from loved ones, it better be worth it. The days of bouncing from one show to the next for nine months of the year are gone. In the past, discourse would dictate that pop-punk was no place for such grown-up chat. But if you want to survive and thrive, these are the kinds of adult conversations that need to take place nowadays. One look at the 2024 When We Were Young line-up will attest to that.
“We’ve had to have a lot of conversations like, ‘Is this even worth it?’ Because it’s like, bro, we’re paying more in commissions, production budgets and merch bills, and when all that stuff adds up, it’s 10 times more than what band members make at the end of a tour.
“But once we get out on tour, we see people screaming the words back, we do meet and greets or we talk with fans, there’s always that one story or moment that’ll make me check myself, like, ‘Oh, hell yeah, I love this shit! This is why we do it.’”
Later today, Derek will hop on calls with bandmates and the wider State Champs team to discuss the minutiae of things like budgets for their upcoming live commitments in North America. This is the hidden glamour of being in a band in 2024 that fans rarely get a sneak peek into. Case in point: an enticing offer recently came in for a trip to Indonesia, playing in front of 100,000 people, which sparked some internal debate and much gnashing of teeth about making the right call. Problem was, the date would require travelling and playing around Christmas, potentially risking either serious disruption to family time, or missing out entirely should one flight connection go awry. Smartly, with toddlers, wives and responsibilities to consider now, the band turned the opportunity down.
It’s a sign of where the quartet are at now, making decisions for the good of their collective long-term health and survival. In the past, such considerations were alien concepts.
“I think we’ve found that sweet spot,” Derek says with a beaming smile. “We knew how to burn ourselves out very easily in the past, but it wasn’t always our choice. It was always ‘go-go-go’ and we were like, ‘This is so exhausting, man, it almost makes us not want to do it.’ So, it’s nice to feel refreshed now and come back to discovering why we loved this in the first place.”
From the outside looking in it seems that State Champs are a band finally taking control of the wheel, possibly because for the first time, they know what direction they should be heading.
“I've been doing this for, like, 14 years. That’s almost half of my life,” the frontman reiterates. “When this ends, I would love to not be stuck out on the streets on the sidewalk without any money, but I also want to be like, ‘Man, I did that shit and I loved that shit and I made a real impact!’ That’s the ultimate goal.”
In the short-to-medium term, Derek is wary of being too giddy on tangible markers of progress having been burned by experience in the past. Should their star ascend to the heights of headliner status on a stage at Slam Dunk or Download, that would of course be welcomed. If their ceiling is destined to remain capped at the level they currently find themselves at, then that’d be just fine, too. The reward for doing what they’ve done on the 12 tracks of their new album appears to be the very act itself. Anything else on top will be a bonus. That doesn’t mean they won’t give it everything they’ve got to find out where this next phase of life could lead.
“We’re still having fun doing it – I think we’re having the most fun now actually – so why would we stop?” Derek says, assessing their outlook. “Why not push even harder? As long as we’re all locked in on that, I think we’ll find that success comes to us rather than searching and reaching for it.”
State Champs' self-titled album is released November 8 via Pure Noise
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