We might know exactly which song has been stuck in your head these last few weeks.
“The Ballad of St Nick’s Park” by 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks is a late contender for the underground anthem of 2026. Over a baroque co-produced concoction of toy keyboard and speaker-rattling bass, 300SkullsAndCounting screams and shouts about adolescent adventures in an uncool English town: filming skate videos and getting drunk in the park with the boys, smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes, potentially encountering a UFO, and being the victim of a particularly unfortunate egging incident.
The discourse kicked off when the “St Nick’s” music video went viral on X. Some viewers appreciated the DSLR depiction of a goofier side of British youth culture; others wrote it off as ‘00s nostalgia bait. Most of the quote posts declared the track a total banger, but there were plenty of haters too. “Truly some of the worst music I’ve heard in my life,” one X user wrote about the weird genre mutation. “It’s almost impressive in how bad it is.”
But 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks are both innovators from separate UK subcultures. So if you want to understand the story behind THIS IS SPA TOWN!, it helps to know each artist’s lore.
In recent years, the Bath-raised, London-based producer Jenny Sparks—whose real first name is Theo—has earned the respect of the UK’s underground party scene. He’s known to DJ at illegal raves and squat parties outside of the traditional club circuit, as well as at sillier, beloved festivals like Boomtown and Balter. His music is a wonky, sample-infused interpretation of bassline, the hard-hitting club genre that crystallized in the mid-2000s at Sheffield’s mythologized Niche nightclub. He’s released three solo albums to date, but really exploded this summer with his TikTok-viral track (that he hates) called “The ting goes quack,” which samples fictional British rapper Big Shaq’s comedic 2017 hit “Man’s Not Hot.”
300SkullsAndCounting, birth name Hal, is a figurehead in the UK’s DIY screamo scene, and plays drums in the band Mitsubishi Suicide. The sound of 300SkullsAndCounting is an innovative take on screamo, incorporating chiptune and breakcore references, which Hal used to release under a spoof label called ‘XD RecAWRdings,’ before being signed by the spoof’s reference, XL Recordings. He is renowned for his intense on-stage performances, which all begin with a 10-minute countup from 0 to 300. A pink microphone is his signature prop.
All this to say: 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks is a very UK collaboration. Even the album’s title is a nod to local culture. “Spa towns” are vestiges of the 1700s and 1800s, when wealthy Georgians and Victorians flocked to towns built around health-giving natural springs. Today, these towns are known as quaint tourist destinations.
300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks both grew up in and around spa towns, and THIS IS SPA TOWN! Is the soundtrack to their personal (and much less quaint) version of life in them.
Context aside, the album has broken containment from their respective scenes, becoming underground culture’s latest sonic embodiment of What’s New.
For their first interview together, we sent their friend Taylor Richardson and photographer Oscar Shepherd to document them in the city of Bath Spa. You’re Welcome.
Taylor Richardson: How did you guys meet?
Hal: My flatmate introduced me to Theo and said, You guys have similar brains, and you’d really get on. Then my friend Trip was staying on Theo’s sofa. I went round to record a song with Trip, and Theo came in, and then we ended up chatting and really getting on. I was like, I really have this cool idea for a bassline remix of my song ‘Eagle vs. Sheagle.‘ Theo was like, “Send me the stems. I emailed you the stems then and there.
Theo: I knew of Hal’s music. Also at a party at the ICA—where everyone’s too cool to say hello to each other—Hal actually came and said hello to me. When we met again at my place, and he was doing fingerboard tricks and being weird, I was like, This guy’s sick.
Hal, what’s your best fingerboard trick?
H: Probably fakey varial flip rewind. That’s not the hardest trick to do, but it does throw people off in a fingerboard game of skate. Or it’s the late front side big heel. I haven’t got that one every time.
Who does what on your album?
T: For the instrumentals, it would mainly be Hal feeding me melodies. He’s pitch-perfect, which I’m absolutely not. So a lot of the melodies were played on Casio keyboards or on like MIDI on Fruity Loops, and then I’d build bass lines and drums around that. Overall, Hal was much more so on like the melodies and lyrics, and me more on the bass and drums. Songwriting was kind of both of us, more so Hal on lyrics.
H: I would take ages.
T: Hal would take a long fucking time, but I think that was good. The sessions I was used to were like two hours, in and out in a rush. But we’d spend entire days together. It was also both of us challenging each other. I’d make a weird bass line and be like, Surely you can’t scream on this? And then he would play a cute melody on a Casio keyboard and be like, let’s make this into a bassline song.
H: It was so fun, because I’d never really experimented with those sounds before. A lot of my music beforehand was really lacking low end bass. I brought a kind of breakcore edge and video game sensibility into Theo’s studio, and then Theo would make it bassliney.
Theo: We were just trying to fuck with each other.
In some of the discourse online [people are arguing that] you could be seen as disrespectful to the genre. What would you say to the people saying that?
T: I mean, I’ve loved bassline since I was about 17 years old. Bassline originated from the Midlands or Huddersfield—although it depends on who you ask—but I was inspired by the kind of wackier, weirder version that came from Sheffield. OffMeNutRecords was a label from there, and I remember hearing a remix of the Pingu theme song on one of their compilations. That whatthefuckness stuck with me and informs everything i do now.
Getting someone who screams loudly on a bassline song sounded like a cool idea to me. If someone screaming over bassline is offensive to you, then I suggest moving to Alaska and shouting at a wall.
H: Honestly, if people in my scenes have a problem with this, then I really don’t give a fuck. My whole life I’ve just been trying to mash things together. We experimented heavily, and this is the product of it. It bangs and it’s from the heart that’s the end of the discussion for me.
That brings me on to the album title, This is Spa Town! You guys both grew up in spa towns. What’s your most tapped hometown experience?
H: I’m from Warwick, which is right next to Leamington Spa. So I’d pretty much spend every day there skating or just hanging out with my friends. And when you do that, especially in a small place, weird things are always bound to happen.
The penultimate track of my album This Is My Zombie-Killing tells one of them.
Another one is that, when I was a kid my parents used to tell me about this kind of famous murderer, and I never really believed it to be real. And then I met him with my friend. He followed us out of the park, and we had to lose his trail.
T: When I was maybe year 11, I had a rap battle with a guy two years above me, a scary guy who always wore a beanie. I couldn’t really rap, but we were all quite drunk in Victoria Park and it was after midnight.
One of my lyrics was something along the lines of You got a stupid hat, and I took his hat off his head as I said it. I got pinned to the wall by his friends. I was sort of terrified. One of his friends came up to my friends and said, He’s either going home with you lot, or he’s coming back with me.
H: What did he mean?!
T: I don’t know what he meant, and luckily I never found out.
Theo, you’ve been going to festivals and parties for quite some time. Boomtown sticks out to me. Do you have any great stories to tell from your times at Boomtown?
T: I’ve been about nine times. It’s quite hard to remember.
I think it was the second year I went, we were in the jobcentre which was a little tent at the top of the hill which basically only played bassline. There was this ginger kid two years above us, running around the venue, rugby tackling people, that was pretty good.
More recently, a kid had a tattoo of my logo on his chest, and he showed it to me in the middle of the set. That was crazy.
Two years back, I was walking back to my tent at 8am, long after the music had stopped, and a guy with a bin and a speaker approached me and said, Would you like to do a set on the top of the hill? And I was like, Sounds like a good idea. I had to run back to my camp, which was about 30 minutes away. Some of my friends saw me, and they said, What are you doing? I said, I’ve got a set. They all thought it was having a mental breakdown, and so did I, but it actually happened, and it was great.
Hal, What’s the most uncomfortable you’ve ever felt on stage?
H: This one time last year, I did a show in a basement in Lucerne, Switzerland. I thought I was really funny, and asked the crowd any questions? at the end of my set. No one asked me a question for five minutes, and I just sat there in silence.
What is your most profound or weird skate park story?
H: One that sticks in my mind. I don’t know if it’s that profound, but it’s definitely memorable. I was sat down next to the skate park, and my friend at the time was putting my hair into braids, they just started pissing at the same time, and then threw up everywhere.
But another one is—and this is in the Ballad of St Nick’s Park video—there was a mysterious black ring of smoke in the sky. I must have been about 13, 14. I thought it was a UFO. Everybody lost their mind. I remember people screaming, What the fuck is that? We’re gonna die! Someone threw their BMX off the top of the hip. It was really like a fuck moment for a lot of people. It stuck with everyone, I hope.
The album’s obviously very personal to both of you guys. What track do you feel most attached to?
T: Probably “Can of K.” I think it was the most fun song to make. I remember us taking quite a while to write the melody, and then when it all came together, we both freaked out.
H: 90% of the lyrics of that song was the first ever lyrics I wrote to a 300Skulls song. I wrote them back in 2023, before I even named the project 300SkullsAndCounting. Those lyrics mean a lot to me.
Favorite UK rap freestyle/cypher?
H: For me, it’s B Don and T1’s “Scene Smasher.” I’ve played that on so many different people’s TVs in the past few years.
T: Mine’s Remtrex’s “Flush Raw.”
Yeah, he’s doing the Big L “Ebonics” thing.
T: He’ll say a phrase and then like to explain what it means. And like during the whole freestyle, his phone’s just going off.
H: Can it be noted that we both chose freestyles from Birmingham.
Dream collaboration, dead or alive?
T: 300SkullAndCounting. Or Whitney Houston.
H: I feel like I was put on this earth to get Skrillex to get the side shave back. And I’m going to be the one to actually shave it as well.
If you had to describe the album in correspondence to a movie, where do you feel it lies?
H: Son of Rambow. It’s about two kids from two different worlds. Theo’s Will Poulter, and I’m the other kid, the Plymouth Brethren one. A lot of the times I was the one going like, Theo, no, we have to concentrate!
T: I would say Shaun of the Dead.
I remember one time after a London Fashion Week party, people were asking each other their favourite film around this table, and everyone was saying some Japanese art film that no one’s ever heard of, and I said Shaun of the Dead, and everyone rolled their eyes and were like, Oh, this fucking annoying boy.
Hopefully one day, there’ll be people sitting around a table after a London Fashion Week party discussing their favourite albums, and someone will say ours, and everyone will roll their eyes too.
Intro: Welcome @welcome.jpeg
Interview: Taylor Richardson @taylor._richardson
Photography: Oscar Sheperd @bewilderhythmic
