Welcome to Pitchfork.com review No. 8,333 on a self-loathing white dude documenting his love-hate relationship with his boring-as-shit but quaint hometown. Up to the plate is 300SkullsAndCounting, aka Hal Hewetson, a twentysomething from Warwick out in the middle of England who has been dropping hard-to-categorize bedroom screamo made with the unchecked curiosity I tend to associate with pandemic-era hyperpop and rave-ready internet rap. Click around his SoundCloud page and you might land on a Miami bass breakdown transitioned into Bring Me the Horizon-style metalcore vocals, or a reference to a forgotten Taika Waititi rom-com morphed into goofball hardstyle EDM. I’d understand if those words I strung together piss you off, but listen, he’s onto something. It just happens that that something is Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape if it didn’t suck and was very British.
Over the wobble-wobble beats of London-based bassline producer Jenny Sparks, THIS IS SPA TOWN!, 300SkullsAndCounting’s debut album for XL, is a slight and pretty sick club-grime recalibration of that glitched-out emo. If you’re confused, it’ll make a little sense when you hear Hal tell John’s Music Blog about his spiritual origin story. Just ignore that it sounds like a parody of the kind of thing that goes down in Netflix YA originals: He showed up to his secondary school dance in a self-printed T-shirt paying homage to rave-rockers Hadouken!, grabbed the mic, demanded the DJ turn off “Gangnam Style”-era jams in favor of Tinie Tempah’s grime-pop hit “Pass Out,” and rapped the whole thing on stage. “I was the most popular non-jock in the year for like one week,” he said.
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Whether you believe he’s trolling the interviewer or not, he indulges in those crotchety fuck-up-the-club vibes all over THIS IS SPA TOWN!. It makes me think about the read-to-rant early grime of Wiley, who on landmark UK rap tracks like “Wot Do U Call It?” was on the ass of the uptight garage scenesters and nerds mislabeling and misunderstanding his music: “Why do you think that I’m stupid?/I got brains I could never be stupid/You can never use my name to make your raves jam/I won’t turn up, I’ll stay at home with my girl and jam.” Hewetson brings a similar angst into SPA TOWN’s “Kill You in the Bace,” where over what seems like Jenny’s digitized remake of a My Chemical Romance guitar riff, he shits on the music venue that’s not taking him seriously. “I would turn it up, but the speaker isn’t big enough,” he chant-sings. “But I don’t give a fuck, the sound guy’s a prick.” It isn’t nearly as deep as Wiley’s middle finger to the local establishments where race and class dynamics are in play, but it is funny: His bratty screams of “Soon enough, all of you hipsters will give a fuck” are like one of those trivial IG story beefs that rip through a microscene for 24 hours extended to song length.
