"No one ever thought about what to do with our lives after the party was over while we were in our twenties. We believed in punk rock, we championed everything about it and most likely had a beer in our hand while doing it.

 

Punk grows up though, and the party and the passion has to be tempered by day to day life, like work and family. Wait, punk grows up? Yes, it does.

 

The passion and the anger are still there though, the music still the soundtrack for everything we do, including owning businesses and starting families. 

 

Gainesville punks have always been a rare breed, interchanging bands like lightning, becoming bands of ex band members…but sometimes the circle becomes complete and it sticks, and it's great together. This, my friends, brings me to Gainesville's SUNSHINE STATE.

 

SUNSHINE STATE has all the ex-member pedigree (Against Me!, Whiskey & Co, J. Page, The Scaries), it has years of grinding it out on the road, and above anything else it has the songs that only veteran punks could write.

 

These guys are doing this because that’s what they do. They aren’t looking to score a VW commercial, or be on the cover of anything, or subsidize a tour to escape their lives. They have families and own businesses now. That doesn’t mean the music in them has stopped, far from it. There is still punk rock flowing through their veins and things they need to get out of their heads. They are from a decade that prefers to spend what little free time they’ve had over the past seven years being in a band, taking years to make an album where every song is worth remembering.

 

Everybody I play Sunshine State for asks about them again days or weeks later because one of their songs would not leave their head. Punknews called their first album POUR (No Idea, 2014) an “enormous epic monster” and then there’s AP who used awful words to describe it like “riff-tastic” and “can’t-stop-listening quality”.  Thankfully the lightning has struck twice, as their new album The Mess is just as good, if not better."

-Vinnie Fiorello