Derek DiScanio laughs when you tell him his band is one of his favorite bands. “I know that sounds weird,” he admits, “but we really are.” He’s sitting in front of a wall of vintage junk that looks like a teenager’s bedroom circa 2003—posters, guitars, the whole nostalgia buffet—and he’s grinning like someone who just realized confidence might actually be punk rock’s missing ingredient.
State Champs have been at this more than a decade now, long enough to see two full revivals of the scene that birthed them. They’re not the scrappy newcomers anymore; they’re the “middle children” of pop-punk, the ones who came in after Fall Out Boy but before the TikTok kids with guitars. “We’re not the young, exciting underband anymore,” DiScanio says. “We’re the ones carrying the torch.”
Their fourth record, Kings of the New Age, is both a victory lap and a reclamation. “It’s about confidence,” he says. “We’ve spent a lot of years being the humble, grateful guys. Now we’re like, no—this is what we do, and we do it well.”
It’s a funny kind of swagger: part self-pep talk, part genre CPR. “I love that guitars and drums are back at the forefront again,” he says, almost relieved. “Let’s let that become a thing again.” He’s talking about the new pop-punk boom, the one where trap beats, pink hair, and Travis Barker’s production schedule have become cultural wallpaper. “Does it have a lot to do with Travis? Maybe,” he shrugs. “Can we still meme it and joke about it? Totally. But I don’t care how many artists he works with—as long as guitars are cool again, I’m good.”
That word—again—hangs over everything State Champs does. They’re revivalists in a genre that keeps reviving itself. For all the talk about trap beats and TikTok scenes, the band wrote this album the old-fashioned way: by sitting around during the pandemic and asking, “What still makes us feel something?”
Usually they’re rushing—write between tours, record before the next bus call, shove the album out in time for the merch cycle. “There weren’t deadlines this time,” DiScanio says. “We had a year and a half to just… make songs we wanted to hear.” The result was thirty of them, trimmed down to eleven. “We think of it like a live set,” he explains. “You can’t have too many jump songs back-to-back. You need the hands-up ones, the head-bobbers, the punk circle-pit ones. It’s gotta feel like a roller coaster.”
He even has advice for young bands: “Space it out. Make people think they’re on a ride. That’s how you make an album that lasts.”
Of course, there’s the matter of that song. “Stitches,” their cover of Shawn Mendes’ mega-ballad, is their most-streamed track—something that’s clearly a sore spot. “We all hate that it’s our number one song on Spotify,” he admits, laughing but only half-joking. “Please, everyone, go listen to anything else. Thank you for liking it, but let’s get our own songs up there.”
It’s not even personal against Mendes. They just don’t want to be that band—the one known for a cover instead of their own catalogue. “No disrespect to anyone who blew up from a cover,” he says. “Alien Ant Farm had ‘Smooth Criminal.’ Cool song, but do you remember another one? Exactly.”
Still, he cops to hypocrisy. “We love doing covers,” he says. “We’re recording another one right now—a Blink-182 song. Early Blink. That’s all I’ll say.” He smiles, knowing that fans will eat it up, and then immediately worries: “But don’t make it our number one song, okay?”
For Kings of the New Age, the songs they did pick tell a kind of story. “It’s about being in a bad place but heading toward a better one,” DiScanio says. “Everyone’s been through some crazy shit the past few years. You lose time, you lose people, you lose momentum. But if you still love what you do, you’ve got to put everything you have into it.”
He talks like someone who’s been through the emotional wringer and decided to stay optimistic out of sheer defiance. “We could be exhausted. We could hang it up. But we still love doing this,” he says. “You’re only here so long, and if something still lights you up, go for it.”
That’s the whole vibe of the record—defiance dressed up as melody. The closing track, “Some Minds Don’t Change,” feels like a sigh after the sprint: “You can try as hard as you want, but sometimes you’re just not gonna get the girl,” he says, with a grin that makes it sound like he’s fine with that. “It’s the journey, man. At least you tried. You miss the shots you don’t take.”
Meanwhile, “Fake It” functions as their pandemic diary—parking-lot hangouts, lost summers, the weird euphoria of finally returning to normal. “It’s about getting back to having a routine again,” DiScanio says. “That Monday smile. Just being happy to do something again.”
He’s right that there’s something quietly heroic about that simplicity. When he sings lines like “Out of my head” over power-chord sugar rushes, it’s not irony—it’s instinct. “We were channeling old-school Blink,” he admits. “Jam something catchy into your head until you can’t get it out.”
By the end of Kings of the New Age, you get the sense that State Champs aren’t chasing relevance anymore—they’ve already found their corner of the scene and built a fort out of it. “We’ve been here a while,” DiScanio says. “Let us show you how to do it.”
And if they’re still the middle children of pop-punk, well, maybe that’s the best place to be. The older siblings burned out. The new ones are still figuring out how to hold their instruments. State Champs, meanwhile, just keep showing up—smiling, loud, and still convinced they’d buy their own record.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
