300SkullsAndCounting & Jenny Sparks Sign To XL Recordings With Chaotic New Single

'The Ballad of St Nick's Park' collides screamo, bassline and chiptune into a nostalgic ode to a long-gone Leamington skatepark.

300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks have announced their signing to XL Recordings, marked by the release of 'The Ballad of St Nick's Park' - the first taste of a forthcoming collaborative project between the two artists.

The single throws 300SkullsAndCounting's screamo vocals, 8-bit sensibilities and baroque toy-keyboard melodies into the ring with Jenny Sparks' bouncy, bassline-driven production, landing somewhere between screamo, rave and club music with none of the edges sanded off. Crucially, this isn't a vocalist-meets-producer arrangement: both artists built the track from the ground up together, and that push and pull is set to define the collaborative album still to come.

The song itself is a tribute to 300SkullsAndCounting's upbringing around Warwick and Leamington Spa, specifically the now-defunct St Nick's Park skatepark; turned, true to form, into something nostalgic, irreverent and thoroughly unhinged. The accompanying music video was filmed partly in Leamington's internet-famous Spar shop.

It's a fitting pairing of two distinct DIY worlds. 300SkullsAndCounting emerges from the UK DIY emo scene with ties to NYC's Sex Emo-adjacent circuit, blending screamo, breakcore and chiptune with flashes of hip-hop and electroclash, brought to life live via an unmissable pink karaoke mic. Jenny Sparks, meanwhile, has spent six years honing his sound from a string of unlikely London studios, including a former hospital hearing-test room and a shed behind an ex-care home in Stratford, pushing bassline's elastic rhythms into stranger territory.

There's also a joke buried in the announcement: the single artwork credits XD RecAWRdings, 300SkullsAndCounting's own spoof label originally modelled on XL, making the real signing all the more fitting.