State Champs On Tour With Neck Deep…
UK rock band NECK DEEP are returning to Australia with The Dumbstruck Dumbf!*k Tour confirmed for April 2025. The boys will kick off the tour on April 21 at Metropolis in Fremantle before heading to Adelaide’s Hindley St Music Hall, Sydney’s Roundhouse, Melbourne’s Festival Hall and concluding at Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall.
Neck Deep will be heading around the country promoting their recently released self-titled album Neck Deep, out now on Hopeless Records. Joining them for all dates will be special guests, Albany New York pop punk act State Champs.
STATE CHAMPS Despite their name, State Champs made four albums without a trophy on the cover. In 2024, that triumphant symbol finally appears, on album five, confidently named simply State Champs, out now on Pure Noise Records. They’ve delivered their music and heartfelt message of passion and resilience on tour with Fall Out Boy, 5 Seconds Of Summer, blackbear, Simple Plan, A Day To Remember, and Boys Like Girls.
Starting in bedrooms and basements in 2010, State Champs quickly ascended as leaders of a new scene owing as much to early Fall Out Boy and Green Day as latter-day Warped Tour bands. State Champs surges with the energy of The Finer Things (2013), Around the World and Back (2015), and Living Proof (2018). It expands on the Kings of the New Age (2022) blueprint. That beloved post-pandemic album proved the band will survive. State Champs now sees them thrive. On State Champs, they cement themselves as an outfit that can and will stand the test of time. Derek DiScanio talks to Hi Fi Way about going on tour with State Champs.
Another Australian tour, I think we should almost be adopting you as our own and maybe you guys need to move here?
I think so too. I would love nothing more. Australia’s one of my favourite places to be. Given it’s been like two, three years now, which is too long for me in between Australian runs. So, I’m happy that we’re finally coming back.
This is shaping up to be a really massive tour with Neck Deep. Do you know those guys well and have you toured with them before?
So many times. Too many to count. Needless to say, they’re like our brothers of the scene, honestly. So, we started around the same time as bands. I think State Champs maybe started a year or two prior to when Neck-Deep started, but, in the same time frame for sure. Then we came up together on our first time to Australia which was with Neck Deep. Our second time to Australia was with Neck Deep and now this’ll be our fourth or fifth time to Australia now and it’s sure enough back with Neck Deep. We’ve done world tours together. We’ve done multiple continents together, Warp tours, co headline tours and everything in between. So, it’s like riding a bike when it comes to touring with the Neck Deep guys. So, we’re happy to be back and we’re both at the peaks of our career now, so it’s an exciting time.
Does it just make it that much easier just touring with people that you really love and absolutely respect?
A hundred percent because we know what each other like and feed off of each other. We can hang out like brothers, and we can argue and bust balls like brothers too. You know, we joke around, we play pranks on each other, everything in between. Our bass player Ryan has a tattoo of Matt West from Neck Deep’s face on his leg and Matt has one of Ryan. So, we’re branded as brothers now.
What is it about Australia that keeps you coming back?
It’s funny because when people ask me what’s my favourite place to travel out of anywhere in the world, I do say Australia. It comes down to the weather, the people, I really like the accent and the shows that we have over there, there’s something about them and the energy that keeps building and the community that we’ve like built over there. It keeps growing and it becomes stronger every time we come out there. It’s really, really fun. I’m excited to see now with our fifth album, our self-titled album that just came out the reception in the States and in Europe and in UK has been incredible. So, we’re trying to carry that momentum into Australia and keep this world tour cycle going.
The last twelve to eighteen months have been huge for you guys. Do you take a moment to stop and reflect on all the good stuff that you have done?
Yeah, it’s pretty wild to think about it. I mean, we’re fifteen years into the band’s career now, which is crazy to me because that’s almost half of my life. I was starting in 2010, I was graduating high school. We put our first album out in 2013 and our second album out in 2015, so it’s the ten-year anniversary of our second album this year too. That’s crazy and sure enough, we just put out our fifth album and it’s our self-titled album. We’ve gone to so many places and have gotten to go back to them multiple times. Our numbers have just grown significantly since and we see a lot of the same people coming out to tours every time we come out and tour their respective areas. Some of them even followed city to city, which is crazy to me. I’m just super grateful, man. This is the only thing we know how to do. If people stop giving a shit about it, I don’t know where we’d be. I’m trying not to take it for granted and trying to keep building on it. It’s really, really heartwarming.
Absolutely, I don’t think I could see you being an accountant or anything like that?
No thanks. I know I’m going to do music forever, but I try to treat every time we go somewhere that’s not our home like it’s the last time I’m going to be there. I try to treat it like I’m never going to go back because you never know, at the snap of a finger if people stop caring about you or something happens, this and that, God forbid, that’s it. So, especially with it being this far into our career, I think maybe we did take it for granted sometimes to an extent, like our time being in certain places when we first started, maybe our first time to Australia. We were excited to be there for the first time. But then the second time with so much momentum on the band, we were just like, yeah, we’ll be back, let’s not go explore, let’s not go hang out, let’s not go try and make friends this and that. We’ll be back. We’re just big now, it’s not like that anymore. You never know what’s going to happen. I don’t think we’re going to slow down anytime soon, but I just see it from a different perspective now, if that makes sense.
Are you focusing more on the new album on this tour?
It’s actually pretty tough. One of the hardest parts about now having five albums is creating a set list and not pissing anybody off. You’re never going to please everybody I’ve found out. The fact that you got to manage not playing too much of the new stuff but also make sure you’re playing enough of it because it just came out and that’s what we’re promoting. It was hard enough to do it on a headline tour, when we’re playing ninety minutes and playing about twenty-five songs now. It’s a different mindset because we’re supporting. We’re going to be playing forty minutes. So, it’s an all-time greatest hit set, but we have to throw in some of the new stuff too. So how much of the new stuff, because we don’t want to leave out any of the hits from prior eras. It’s the biggest challenge we’ve had yet and needless to say, it’s a big argument in the group chat but we’re going to get there!
In Melbourne you’re doing a DJ set. Do you enjoy doing those types of shows as well?
Dude, I love doing that stuff. I mean, we’re all just kids at heart and what it comes down to is if we’re at a bar hanging out with our friends and we can just get to hit play on our favourite songs and jam out to them as if it’s a real show, I’ll do that any day of the week. It’s really fun. So those that haven’t had enough at the end of the State Champs/ Neck Deep show, follow us over to the Melbourne Club night and we’ll have a night together. It’s going to be great.
How do you sort of prepare for a pretty tough tour schedule?
We’re definitely kind of numb to it at this point with how much traveling and how much lack of the sleep or lack thereof, if you will. But, especially with me, my instrument is my voice, so I guess it’s pretty important to take care of it and the best way to do that and manage that is sleep and water. No matter where we are, I’m like a trained professional at sleeping on airplanes now. I sometimes can fall asleep immediately upon sitting down on the plane and then I’ll wake up when we touch down. I think that’s important to make sure that I’m resting when I can and hydration is important, but that flight is no walk in the park over to Australia. Jet lag is going to play into effect. Like I said, it’s, it’s hard to pick that set list for forty minutes, but it is still forty minutes, and we’re dialled in right now, coming off of the ninety minutes sets in UK, Europe and the United States. So, this is going to feel like nothing, honestly. I just hope people are ready for it and leave it all out on the floor because you only get forty minutes, so get there early and be ready.
Are you stoked about Warped Tour coming back?
Oh, dude. Yeah, it’s exciting man. I was talking about this a little earlier. Warp Tour is something that we absolutely owe our career to and it’s something that paved the way for bands like us to be able to do what we do and it was what I loved going to see all my favourite bands when I was a kid. 2005 was the first Warped Tour I ever went to, and that was twenty years ago. I was twelve years old. It’s going to be a wild thing now twenty years later, but it’s the thirty year anniversary of Warped Tour as a whole for it to come back and have some sort of taste of what it used to be. It’s on a bigger scale now and it’s only in select cities and it’s more festival style with more bands, but the fact that it’s coming back to some capacity, it’s going to be amazing. I’m glad they asked us to be a part of all the cities. We’re going to have a blast. We can only hope that it comes down to Australia like it did back in the early two thousands.
Beyond Australia, what’s next for State Champs? Are you starting to think about what might be the next album?
A hundred percent. We’re already thinking about what we want to do next. We’re going to get back into the studio when we get back home from this run and see what we want to do. I’m not sure if we’re going to look into maybe doing something like a deluxe edition of the self-titled album that we just did, maybe with some remixes and guest features on some of the songs and maybe stripped down or alternate versions of some of the songs, which could be cool. But there will be new songs integrated with that as well. We’re going to create some new songs and maybe play the single game for a little bit and put out some singles. People’s attention spans are very minimal these days, so you can’t go too long without creating some new content or new music for people to listen to. So, we’re definitely thinking about that already. We also need to figure out what’s going on with our label situation as well, because we might be free agents, needless to say, now that this album is out.
That sounds like an exciting period potentially and might open up a whole lot of opportunity being free agents as well?
Yeah, exactly. We’ve only been with one label our entire career, so it’s an exciting time to see maybe what else is out there, but we’re not unhappy with where we are. The options are endless, so we’ll see, we’ll see what the future holds.
Do you get to have a break in there at some point as well?
I hope so! That would be nice, wouldn’t it? It’s so funny. I got a new place in Los Angeles where I’m at right now, but I haven’t been here in two months. I finally got back yesterday and I have a week and a half off, so this is kind of brilliant right now. I’m enjoying that while I can before we leave for Asia, but we’re always on the go. We’re used to it. It’s not a new thing to us. We’ll always find the way to navigate that as time goes on.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch State Champs on the following dates with Neck Deep, tickets from Live Nation…
DJ Set In Melbourne
