Any one crowd surfer’s journey took perhaps 30 seconds, but the relentless tide pushed song after song throughout State Champs’ raucous, sold-out show at the Playstation Theater in NYC on March 8th.
After “Safe Haven,” guitarist Tyler Szalkowski recalled how the band played a gig in Brooklyn around 2011 and “literally no one came.” (The band played since-closed venue XPO 929 twice that year, per setlist.fm.)
“This is insane,” he added, before the band launched into “Easy Enough.”
State Champs hail from Albany, N.Y., but this NYC gig felt like another milestone in the band’s ascendant career.
As the crowd waited for State Champs to take the stage, pop-punk classics boomed over the theater’s stereo system. Tracks like The Starting Line’s “The Best of Me” and All Time Low’s “Weightless” were a common currency among the audience members, and huge singalongs of those tracks rumbled throughout the crowd.
As soon as the band emerged and kicked things off with the thrashing riff of “Criminal,” though, all eyes were on them. Lead singer Derek Discanio was the focal point of the performance, bringing his electrifying presence throughout the set. Whether he was imploring the crowd to bounce (on “Lightning”) or showing off his vocal chops in a solo acoustic moment (on “If I’m Lucky”), he masterfully orchestrated the energy of the crowd throughout the evening.
And he also made a point to mention the recent five-year anniversary of their debut studio album The Finer Things. The set leaned solidly into their earlier material, including “Hard to Please,” “Remedy,” “Easy Enough,” “Simple Existence” and “Elevated.” Unsurprisingly, the crowd knew all the words to these tracks as well.
All this is not to say Discanio didn’t have a little help from his friends. Whether the song was slow- or fast-paced, there was a constant anthemic quality to how the tracks rendered live in their instrumentation. Drummer Evan Ambrosio crushed a pummeling drum beat during “Criminal” and the choruses of “Crystal Ball.” And the formidable trio of Szalkowski, guitarist Tony Diaz and bassist Ryan Scott Graham delivered punchy riff after punchy riff during tracks like “All You Are Is History,” “Shape Up” and “Mine Is Gold.”
As the main part of the set came to a close, the band unleashed one of their biggest hits, “Dead and Gone.” Suddenly, it felt just like the singalongs before the set, when everyone simply knew they had to belt out the words. Punctuated by its bouncing opening riff and crowd-pleasing “whoa-oh” backing vocals, the track proved perfect for the fans to raise their arms to the sky and scream out the words in a moment of pure euphoria.
As the band departed the stage, a chant of “Let’s-Go-State-Champs!” reverberated through the crowd, urging the band to return. Shortly after, they did just that, delivering an encore of “Elevated” and “Secrets.” As the final song drew to a close, Discanio and Szalkowski stood on their platforms, triumphantly raising their fists. The singer turned around in a crouch before leaping toward the back of the stage to cap off the night.
With the audience’s feverish response to “Dead and Gone” and “Secrets,” it seems like State Champs are destined to have their songs join the pantheon of pop-punk greats, the kind of tracks that younger fans will just know a decade down the line if their tracks are booming over a venue PA before a show begins.
