Review Summary: "We're a cliché now and I hate it."
State Champs have no doubt cemented themselves as one of pop-punk's premier acts. I'd venture as far as to say they'll eventually be remembered as a pillar of the 'defend pop-punk' movement of the 2010s (think Neck Deep, The Story So Far and The Wonder Years), when the genre lost most of the steam and commercial prestige it enjoyed in the previous decade. Derek DiScanio is one of the best vocalists in the genre's history, and his wailing tenacity helped color the band's 2013 debut
The Finer Things, which became an immediate addition to the genre's all-time canon. With each successive album, however, it seems like the band has yielded diminishing returns, and their newest self-titled effort continues that indolent glide down.
One thing
State Champs has going for it is that it's a lot smarter than its predecessor, 2022's
Kings of the New Age, which traded the band's typically clever kind of fun for a harmless, but insubstantial and even brainless fun instead. And that was too bad, because
Living Proof had picked up where
Around the World and Back left off in terms of growing the band's sound and giving them a wide berth of ideas to toy with.
Kings was their first step backwards, and
State Champs, despite its best efforts, fails to gain back much of the ground lost.
Hope is not lost, though. The band continues to churn out a well-produced and performed product. Derek's vocals are as golden as they've ever been, and bar none the group's trademark asset. Even if the lyrics are more on the nose than ever before (see "Sobering"), Derek is so damn likeable, that the output is interesting enough to make it all worthwhile. There's still plenty of rollicking fun to be had, like on "Golden Years" and "I Still Want To", which boast of some driving guitar-led melodies and song structures, and Derek's charismatic delivery.
What really holds the album back is the feeling that State Champs are painting by numbers. You can collect any batch of songs off this project with almost any configuration of tracks from their last three albums, and you'd have a hard time figuring out what goes where. It seems like the band is frozen in time, still tackling the same themes in a way that can only seriously be relevant to a cabal of college-age frat boys. "Save Face Story" has to be the biggest disappointment; NPCs Slope pop up on the bridge to lay down a laughably bad verse that almost derails a great song with one of the band's best choruses
ever, leaving Derek to pick up the pieces with a serviceable outro.
State Champs is unlikely to win the band any new fans, nor drive any away. It's a tried and reliable brand of energetic pop-punk that can never reasonably be counted out. Look to
The Finer Things once more as the best exemplar of the band's potential, but don't shortchange the genuine value still present. Derek and the boys can still make me nod my head with the best of 'em, so they're always worth a try.
