INTERVIEW: 300SKULLSANDCOUNTING

BRINGING BACK AWESOME

In his music, the British artist 300SkullsAndCounting resurrects the ancient Millennial art of getting awesome. It’s a jumble of chiptune, screamo, breakcore and beyond, performed by a guy with a pink mic and a pineapple t-shirt. Not unlike fellow British artist and collaborator Worldpeace DMT, whose meta-psychedelic music is equally suited for multiple age brackets, 300SkullsAndCounting has been able to wrangle fresh energy out of styles that have been mostly absent from the contemporary megamix.

After years of aloof action on the indie rock peripheries—one 300SkullsAndCountingSong proclaims “Dean Blunt’s dead,” though, to be fair, that same song also says that he doesn’t “actually have a problem” with Dean Blunt, but the point stands—it feels good to hear music that really goes for it, music that could sit next to Bring Me The Horizon or Narwhalz (Of Sound). The 300SkullsAndCounting set I caught around this time last year at a sports bar in Brooklyn reminded me of the specific power that can only come from a single person freaking out over pre-recorded backing tracks inside of a venue whose owners couldn’t be thrilled about what is happening.

I recently video chatted with the artist, whose real name is Hal Hewetson, from his hometown: Warwick, in the Midlands of England, where he recently moved after a run in London.

I think you represent a certain energy that sort of died in indie and underground music for a minute.

This is what the whole “bringing back awesome” thing is.

I was going to ask you about that.

So there’s this guy called Ziggy, superkidman—an internet friend who moved to London from Perth, Australia. I think he got to London thinking it was gonna be all Bang Face breakcore-y, and was quite let down by how just kind of lobotomized it felt. The music scene felt a bit droney and miserable, which I get. People love that. I don’t love it. Ziggy definitely didn’t love it. So he just said to me one time, “We’re going to bring back awesome, man.” And we tried, we tried. We had one really good show.

What year was this?

This was the end of 2024 into the whole of 2025.

Only one good show?

It was the London show of “The New Our Tour” with The Dallas Cowboys and we played at the Windmill, which is a venue that I dissed in a song. We deliberately played there because I wanted to wake it up a bit. Some people who read this probably hate me for saying that and think it’s already a great place. I think it is a great place, too, but I think it got stuck on this one thing. Also I wanted an excuse to do a graphic of a windmill with razor blades as sails chopping hipster heads off.

For readers of John’s Music Blog in America that aren’t deep into British indie rock, could you talk a little bit about the Windmill?

Well, the Windmill is a cutting edge, well, was a cutting edge venue in Brixton. I’m being really careful about what I say because I do have love for this place and I’ve had some great times there. For me personally, I believe that it had its day by the time I got to London and people were just forever clinging, trying to replicate its heyday, you know?

Yeah.

It felt to me as though every time I went there, nothing really changed. In that song “Shakespeare’s Garden (Freestyle),” I added in that “no one gives a fuck about the Windmill” line also because it gave me some possible wordplay with windmilling, the hardcore dance move. Maybe I’m mistaken but I never saw any screamo at the Windmill either, which was another incentive for that show. “Emos seize The Windmill for one night” type thing. That show really felt special. It was my first crowdsurf as well.

Everybody remembers the first crowdsurfing experience.

Yeah, I got dropped on the floor. I really went for it and then people didn’t realize that they had to kind of carry on holding me, and I just got dropped and then lost my microphone and really hurt my backbone.

Have you crowdsurfed since?

Yeah. In Brussels, I crowdsurfed at an acoustic show, which was really funny. I had this cardboard wheel, which had a load of different challenges on it. I spun it and it landed on “do every single challenge.” So there were 17 challenges or something, and my set was an hour long of doing all these different challenges. One of them was a silent crowdsurf. I just went for it and people hadn’t processed what I’d said really yet. I just jumped and failed, instantly failed. And then I was like, Okay, attempt two.

So you played for an hour?

Yeah, just because I had to complete all these challenges, one of which was counting to 300 manually. Normally I have a backing track which does it for me but for this show I had to count up to 300 myself, because it was unplugged. That took up 15 minutes. So then 45 minutes was then doing the rest of the challenges and also doing my songs on top of that.

I recently watched a YouTube review of your first record.

I was just talking to the guy. We had a big chat on Instagram.

In the video, he was trying to say some stuff about the Dean Blunt talk on “Eagle vs. Sheagle.”

I don’t really know why he asked the question, because we kind of clear it up in the song. There is a disclaimer in the song. I don’t think any further comment is necessary on that, to be fair.

Was it a good chat?

It was a great chat. Yeah, lots of jokes, he told me to come to Sacramento to play a show. And I said, “noted, noted.”

Would you ever do a full US tour?

Oh my God, that’s all I want to do. I got offered one, but I had to turn it down for some reasons… I came for a couple shows last year though, I don’t know if you were there.

I was at the Brooklyn show.

OK. Weird ass show, weird ass place.

Such a good show, though.

Yeah. Doing a show like that off a restaurant sound system was so funny. But yeah, anyways, I want to do a US tour as soon as possible.

For sure.

It makes a lot of sense for me to tour the US because that’s actually where 75 percent of my fanbase is. But for now, I’ve just got to carry on doing shows around here to way less people. Either I become a bit more awesome, or you guys become a bit more awesome, if you know what I mean.

You do travel around Europe, though.

Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot since I left London, which is really, really cool.

What kind of shows do you play?

So for example, last week I played this two-day festival thing in Paris. The lineup for the day that I played was me, Jazz Lambaux unplugged, which I’m also a part of, and then that guy Torus. Bedroom screamo, unplugged folk punk, and then ambient electronic music—so yeah, I’m often booked for really eclectic nights in Europe, not screamo shows. I don’t think I’ve ever played a screamo show in mainland Europe. It’s more experimental, performance art adjacent stuff.

You and The Dallas Cowboys and maybe a few others, you have major alliances with the screamo world, but you’re sort of the musical outliers in that scene.

It does feel like that.

Where do you feel more comfortable?

I feel most comfortable in clubs. Just really mindless parties kind of suit my set well. People are already amped up but then I hit them with something different. Even if people don’t like screaming, I think the tempo and energy carries it for them. I also like fucking with people in that context, short songs, stopping and starting, trolling, etc. I think I honestly might feel the least comfortable playing with just guitar bands. I feel quite judged sometimes for that or like, less powerful because it’s just me and my laptop. I played a festival in the UK in a town called Stoke-on-Trent and it was just all metalcore, deathcore, some screamo bands, etc.—I was the only electronic act. I felt so outsider, weird and quite empty. But then a girl turned up in full blue body paint, dressed as an Avatar, and screamed along to my set so all those initial feelings went away.

So you would love to play one of those Bang Face parties?

I really would love to play Bang Face or something like that. I think my set would go down really well playing to older breakcore heads but unfortunately, that generation has not discovered me yet. Me and my friend Jenny Sparks are working on a project right now, I think we are going to try to either play Bang Face this year, or next year, or maybe never. Maybe it’s never going to happen.

Listening to your music, it seems perfect for that era of raver. Have you been before?

No, never been to Bang Face. I’m not even much of a raver myself. I just ended up making quite harsh music that works really well at raves. So.

What are some of your early experiences with underground music?

Indie rock, honestly. My first-ever experience in a music scene was when I was 15 in Birmingham. We had this pretty popping indie rock scene and I was the drummer in one of the bands. We kind of just did Good Morning covers. Alongside that I was doing big band jazz competitions and improv stuff—not very underground. There wasn’t really much of a punk or hardcore scene that I was aware of when I was growing up. Especially in my small town. When I was really into bands like Enter Shikari, Bring Me The Horizon, Of Mice and Men, etc., I was way too young to go to any gigs and couldn’t afford it. Then when I was old enough to go to gigs and start playing, indie rock had taken over.

Watching you play, I saw a connection to a sort of solo karaoke freakout style that I remember from when I was younger. I vaguely remember you were wearing an all-over print hoodie and had some kind of a colored microphone.

If we’re talking about the Brooklyn show, I was wearing a green pineapple t-shirt. And I had a pink mic. That’s the uniform every time. It’s actually a karaoke mic, too.

Do you feel like you’re consciously calling back to a certain era? You were first into this stuff when you were what, like 12 or 13?

Yeah. But I was just into mallcore, essentially. When I was younger, I didn’t dig for music and I wasn’t on the internet that much. There was this place in Birmingham called the Oasis, whatever band t-shirts they sold was my directory of shit to listen to. A lot of the stuff I’m into now I was totally unaware of. Anyway, I wouldn’t say it’s a conscious callback in terms of my performance and styling, etc., because the pink microphone and the pineapple t-shirt kind of just fell into my hands. That side of things is more serendipitous than nostalgic. But in terms of the sound, it’s definitely a longing for an era that I was alive in, but had no idea about.

Maybe you had an idea of the rough outlines of the culture.

Yeah. I mean, I was a big Hadouken fan when I was that age. I don’t know if you know Hadouken?

Yeah, I do.

People have compared my live set to Hadouken before, which is a big compliment to me. If there are two bands from my youth that define me as an artist now, it would be Enter Shikari and Hadouken, for sure. In year seven, my first year of secondary school, we had a disco, and I remember printing my own Hadouken t-shirt and then going there and going on stage. No one was meant to perform, everyone was just enjoying music and dancing to “Gangnam Style” and shit, but I remember going on stage and grabbing the mic from the sixth former DJ and being like, “Put on ‘Pass Out’ by Tinie Tempah” and I just rapped it word for word. I was the most popular non-jock in the year for like one week. I feel like that was the beginning of 300SkullsandCounting for sure.

Is that Sheagle coaster you’re using a one of one?

This is where it comes from. We were just drunk making coasters at Christmas. There’s a movie called Eagle vs Shark and I slurred my words and said, “We should watch that Eagle vs Sheagle film.” Ziggy then drew a coaster with a sheagle on it and boom.

The Sheagle conjures images of a different, friendlier moment in internet culture.

I’m glad. I’m glad.

Yeah, ninjas, too. Somehow in my mind, ninjas are related to all of this.

Ninjas, sharks, everything. The Midnight Beast have a song called “Ninjas.” They also have a song called “I Kicked the Shark in the Face.” Hearing that when you’re 11 years old, I think, does things to you. Sets you on a path for later life. My mum threw my Midnight Beast CD away when she found out one of the songs was called “Strategy Wanking.” I think that sets you on a path for later life, too.

And that’s kind of related to your collaborations with superkidman: I feel like there’s sort of a meta rap energy there. It’s joke rap that is quoting the history of joke rap. Especially on the newest EP.

What’s really funny is, the feature I think you’re referring to was kind of accidental. We were in Australia over Christmas, that’s when we made that song, and I was really rooting for superkidman to actually flow over the beat. We made the beat one evening and I recorded my verse really quickly. Then we sent it to Superkidman and I said, prepare some lyrics for next week, because that’s when we were going to the studio. We kinda made the beat for him rather than for me. In the studio session, he tried a few things out but he really wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t wanna force it but at the same time I really wanted this to work.

Then he said, “I was freestyling in the car the other day to prepare for the session, do you wanna hear it?” He played the voice memo to me, and I was just like, this is the fucking feature right here. So the dumb rehearsal of what he was gonna do on the beat became the actual thing. Meta rap, yes, but as a byproduct of not feeling oneself, ha ha.

Well, I guess there’s only so many ways that a certain kind of freestyle rapping can go.

Exactly. By the way, I just got new British Knights in the post actually. I’ll show you. Check these ones.

Hal holds up a single low-top black sneaker that has an argyle pattern on its side.

Wow.

Three pounds.

How much?

Three pounds.

What?

Yeah. They’re just giving these away. What is this?

So it’s a buyer’s market for British Knights.

I’ve been saying this at shows. No one’s listening.

So you’re trying to hoard the British Knights stock, make the shoes cool through your music, and then you’re going to sell them?

Exactly. Yeah. You know exactly what we’re trying to do here. That and accidental meta rap.

._x, 300SkullsAndCounting’s new collaboration with ValuableScholar, is out now.