When State Champs came to The Panda Studios, they hadn't made a full-length record yet. They had some EPs, a Pure Noise deal, and potential. But there was no established career, no giant audience, and no guarantee that any of it was going to work.
Pure Noise came to me with a pretty specific goal. We had built something special with The Story So Far. Now they wanted to see if we could help launch another young pop-punk band at that level.
So I went full Sam Pura.
What We Did
We made The Finer Things at The Panda Studios. I wasn't interested in simply documenting the band as they walked through the door. The job was to make the record sound like the band they had the potential to become.
That meant getting deeply involved in the arrangements, performances, tones, engineering, and mix. I played all of the bass and contributed various guitar parts throughout the record. And when the record needed more than that, I did whatever it took to get the songs and performances across the finish line.
The goal wasn't "let's make a good first record." It was: let's make a record that puts this band in the conversation immediately.
Then It Worked
The Finer Things earned a rare 5/5 review from Kerrang!, and years later remains recognized as one of the defining records of its era of pop punk.
The band went from making their first album at Panda to becoming one of the breakout bands of that generation. They played Warped Tour, opened for All Time Low, toured Australia and New Zealand with 5 Seconds of Summer, and eventually won Best Breakthrough Band at the Alternative Press Music Awards.
And The First Record Still Holds Up
The clearest way to see it is next to what came before Panda.
The point wasn't to capture where State Champs were. It was to help build where they were going.
They came to Panda without a full-length record. They left with The Finer Things. What followed was international touring, arenas, hundreds of millions of catalog streams, and a career that has lasted more than a decade.
Sometimes a producer's job is to capture a great band. Sometimes it's to help make the band great.