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State Champs open up on response from 5 Seconds Of Summer tour

Last summer, current co-AP cover stars State Champs embarked on a brief Australian tour as direct support for 5 Seconds Of Summer.

Read more: 5 Seconds of Summer and State Champs are touring Australia this Summer

The move was met with both support and opposition from fans. While some were proud of the band for earning such a big opportunity, others labeled it as a “sell out” move.

In the latest issue of AP, frontman Derek DiScanio and guitarist Tyler Szalkowski open up on the response they received from the tour. 

QUIZ: Which pop-punk band are you?

“We still get shit for it,” says Szalkowski. “The day we announced the tour, we got shit for it. It kind of blew my mind that some people didn’t recognize the opportunity that  it was for us—and for the genre, honestly.”

DiScanio continues, “It was like 50-50: People who were very excited for us and wanted to see where that would take us, even though it was just a short tour. And then there were the people who said, ‘Sayonara, nice to know you.’”

Read more: The pop-punk coloring book is real and it's glorious

He later adds, “It was only like six or seven shows we did with them. A lot of people don’t even know that it happened. It went by so quickly. It opened us up to some new fans, which is great, and it definitely may have rubbed some of our core fans the wrong way in that [imitates angry fan], ‘You’re trying to open yourselves up to their mainstream pop thing, you’re going to change your sound and you’re going to do all these things differently now.’ And that wasn’t the idea at all; it was something we wanted  to do. Those guys are really good friends of ours: They took care of us and those shows were amazing. Why wouldn’t we want to play to 15,000 people in sold-out arenas.”

You can read the entire interview with State Champs in AP 333, which is on sale now.