State Champs

Live Review By Jennifer Pinckney

It’s a not-so-quiet Sunday night in downtown Denver, CO, where five amazing bands showed off their skills and easily had their fans singing and crowd surfing along at the Pure Noise Records Tour of 2021.

At 6 pm, the doors opened at the Summit Music Hall where it was nearly a sold-out show. We were all packed in nice and tight. The first band called Bearings came on promptly at 6:30 and wasted no time getting the party started. Bearings definitely had more than a few fans in the crowd because we could hear hundreds of people singing along. These guys were a great act to open up tonight’s party.

Next up was Just Friends, a super fun, dancing, lively, goofy 6-piece masterpiece that blew us away. I loved seeing their uniqueness and confidence on stage. You could obviously tell that they were having fun and they definitely helped the crowd to have a lot more fun. They weren’t shy at all to shake their booties in front of us.

Four Year Strong was next up on the stage and they needed no introduction. The crowd wasted no time getting the mosh pit started and keeping the crowd surfers coming to the front. They brought on the dark and heavy music and the crowd went wild! They really enjoyed seeing this band return after what feels like years since we had seen them last.

Real Friends took the stage at 9 pm and owned the room with the crowd singing along very loudly. Their set included a few familiar songs, such as “Me first” and “Get by.” I gotta admit, that song has incredible lyrics: “You’ll get by, while I get better.” Doesn’t get much better than that! Oh but wait… we still had one more band….

The reason why so many people came out tonight…. STATE CHAMPS! The crowd was even more fired up (if you can imagine that), crowd surfers kept coming and coming to the front and the band even got a circle pit started up. It was nice to see so many people having such a good time! Hard not to have a good night when you have a great lineup of bands like we did tonight. Most of the songs were loudly sung by the crowd, so vocalist Derek DiScanio put the mic down, smiled, and encouraged the crowd to keep singing. State Champs is one of my favorite bands because of the melodic songs they have, their energy, their lyrics, and their presence on stage. Tonight’s show was epic. Can’t wait until the next one!