Hip-Hop Lives Here
Hip-Hop Lives Here
Frydae Killasmoke and Lady-A Da Lyristarr have been rapping together for almost 20 years, since 2004, as UNDISPUTED, the house group of their own record label, Champ Records Music Production.
Now, they are taking their group, their label and their signature Hood Crunk sound to the world beyond their native home town, Houston. Their vehicle is “Dope,” a single, and the album that includes it, called Gain on My Level.
“In the hoods where we grew up, they do hood music,” said Frydae, “but no one does the crunk sound. So, that’s why we added the crunkness into it. Even if we did something mellow, it’s always gonna have a crunk vibe to it. So when people hear from UNDISPUTED, they can always know that they’re going to receive a crunkness in the sound because we like for people to really vibe to our music more than just sitting there listening.”
“It’s actually the energy,” said Lady-A, talking about Hood Crunk and “Dope” and the album.
“It’s like good energy, good vibes on everything we do. Everything we do is legit. It’s cool. It’s fly. It’s all those kind of words. Anything that we do, we put all our energy into it.”
“Dope” and Gain on My Level first came out in 2020, the heavy duty promotion delayed, like so much else, by the pandemic and associated consequences across the music industry.
“With that being said, we never gave this project a chance, so here we are,” said Frydae.
The hook to “Dope” is like a statement of purpose, a mission statement, a manifesto, or all of those rolled into one:
Hay we still gone make it, we ain’t bout the faken,
ain’t no use to hatin’,
(everything we do is dope).
Out the hood we made it, so we keep Parlayin’,
you can keep the hatin’,
(everything we do is dope).
The crunk in the sound, said Frydae, is in “the trebles, the hi-hats, the multiple bass lines, the kicks, and how they come back to back,” and when you listen to UNDISPUTED, “when you listen to the tones, the tone of each sound is always a different crunk sound.”
Lady-A added, “It’s also when we bring it to life with our lyrics. Each one of us writes our own lyrics, and that’s when we bring it all together with the track.”
In their music, the beats mostly come first, but sometimes it’s the lyrics that kick off the track.
“I’m a producer that pretty much plays it by ear,” said Frydae. “So, I can hear a person spit a rap or sing a song and I can make the beat right there on site.”
Lady-A illustrates: “Sometimes, I can just be thinking of something, and I may come up with a hook. Then I’ll come to him and say, ‘You know, this would be a great hook.’ And then he’ll say, ‘Just rap it out to me,’ and I’ll rap out what I’m thinking, and then he’ll make the track. Next thing you know, we’ll come in, we’ll sit together, and then Frydae writes his part, and then he records us, and it just becomes a song.”
The 22 tracks of Gain on My Level are mostly Frydae and Lady-A together, nine tracks of the 22, each with their own parts. Eight other tracks are solos by Frydae (including “Shine on a Beat,” “Six 57,” and “Physics”), and five solos by Lady-A (including “Born Alone,” “Lady Nawfside,” “Still Me”).
The subject matter, like the beats, is a mix of styles, from club to life.
“We got the party songs, where we talk about turning up in a club and dancing and things like that, and then we got the realistic songs, the true-life issues.”
Sometimes, the lyrics have a personal vibe.
“I have a song called ‘Still Me,’ and, since we’ve been in the industry for a long time, some people know us from when we used to perform back in the day,” said Lady-A. “So ‘Still Me’ was kind of just letting everybody know, like, I’m still here, but better.”
“I got one called ‘Six 57,’” said Frydae, “and it’s the overall bar-for-bar type of song. I’m just spitting bars back to back, trying to give people a vision of the real Frydae Killasmoke.”
Next for UNDISPUTED, after the promotion for “Dope” and Gain on My Level, is another album, sometime around the holidays. Several more singles and videos, including more from the tracks on Gain, will lead up to it.
“And once we build up enough, we’re going to start getting our own venues down here in Houston and surrounding areas,” said Frydae.
“And we want to go from there and see what the future brings with it,” he said.
By any measure, the future should be bright for UNDISPUTED, their unique Hood Crunk sound, and Champ Records Music Production. To be part of that future, stay connected on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts.
Websites:
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Westside Cowboy caught up with NME backstage at Reading 2026 to tell us about their whirlwind year, slapping a smile on the face of modern indie, and hopes for “weirder, poppier” new music.
Fresh from the release of their acclaimed and long-awaited debut album ‘It Goes On‘, the rising Manchester alt-country outfit packed out The Ballroom tent at both Reading and Leeds sites.
This was their first time playing the legendary festival, but singer and guitarist Reuben Haycocks came as a young punter in 2019, their return bringing bad a flood of “PTSD” from that heady weekend. This time through, they were one of the most talked-about acts of the weekend – and certainly one of our highlights.
From winning the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition last year to then smashing Glasto before R+L, does anything phase the recent NME cover stars anymore?
“A lot of things phase us, every day,” replied fellow singer and guitarist Jimmy Bradbury. “It’s a strange one. We have a very lovely team of people around us who help keep us sane. I feel like we’re still playing music with our friends, and that’s the way I hope it stays.”
He continued: “We’re at that stage of a tour now where we’ve been away for a very long time and we’re questioning our own existence. Is this real? Are We real?”
It’s been a whirlwind year for the NME 100 alumni, starting with supporting Geese on tour back in March when they called at London’s iconic Hammersmith Apollo. What was it like to be part of that bubble of hype and madness?
“We were sort of leeching off the bubble,” replied Haycocks. “We were very lucky to get that tour and they were so lovely. Generally the atmosphere of the whole tour was great and all the crowds were amazing. Hammersmith was the first time I ever walked on stage and noticed how big it was. We’re excited to hopefully play our songs to that many people who know them, now that the album is out.”
Bradbury agreed: “That was one of the first stages where you go out and you immediately notice and take in the history that’s been there: Springsteen’s first London concert, the last ever Ziggy Stardurst concert – which I was watching the other day and his guitar player Mick Ronson is amazing. There’s a moment where it’s really dark, the lights flash and you can see Bowie being projected onto the side of that place. It still looks the same as that and it’s an amazing venue.”
Still, the band modestly that admit that the highlight of 2026 so far has simply been putting out their debut album.
“I don’t know if we intended to go this far, but we’re here and we’re liking it,” Bradbury admitted. “There are so many different stages to putting an album together: finding which songs, recording the songs, mixing them, getting your masters back and it’s like, ‘We’ve done it!’ Then you get the cover back and it’s like, ‘We’ve done it again!’ By the time it comes to releasing it, you feel like you’ve done it already five times. It’s a moment of it finally just clicking together and it’s really exciting.”
Speaking of how it feels to finally have the record out in the universe and have listeners understand their true selves, Haycocks shared: “We’re making an effort to read reviews as little as possible, considering we’re already on tour and questioning our existence. My dad will send me a bit of a review that’s really nice, and then just to ground me he’ll send me a horrible comment, just so I don’t get above my station.”
“We’ve just played, and it was nice to see people sing the words to songs that were sort of new to us. Seeing people with their arms up in the air and knowing these songs that were once just a thought, that’s a pinch-me moment.”
The band recently told NME how their primary focus was “bringing the fun back into the music generally” and “taking everything a little less seriously” in terms of songwriting. It’s rarer than you’d hope to share joy at these hellscape times such as this, but it’s admirable. Have Westside Cowboy felt that reflected back at them?
“We could feel it today,” replied Bradbury, speaking of their Reading performance. “There were bucket hats flying off in the air, people had some lovely signs written. We try and keep it light-hearted. There are so many instances from when we’ve been in bands before where you take it so seriously that you run yourself into the ground. Everybody just really try to let go of that. We wanted to do the best we can with what we have and use as few chords as possible.”
Do they feel more new bands adopting that approach as the world continues its doom spiral?
“There are a lot of new bands that come from the scene we come from that do that amazingly: there’s Pushbike, Bramwell, Holly Head, countless, countless bands that have that idea woven in,” said Haycocks. “It’s really lovely to see bands smiling on stage again. Maybe it was a little fashionable to be smouldering for a while.”
We briefly pause the interview to give us their best ‘blue steel’ smoulder. Their attempt gets points for effort.
“Some people can do that really well, and there are some bands I really love that can do that, but most people – especially those who are similar to us – just look like idiots,” Haycocks continued. “It’s nice to see people smiling and looking like they’re enjoying themselves. This should be the thing they want to do, so show it.”
It may seem a selfish question given that they’ve just dropped one of the year’s best-reviewed albums, and we ask only because we know how restless and unstoppable they are, but are Westside Cowboy already at work on album number two?
“We were driving down to London when the album came out at midnight. We all stood up, shook each other’s hands as the van was moving and went, ‘Cool, we’ve got until we get to the hotel then we’ll start thinking about the next one’,” Bradbury told us. “We’ve got a few things floating around, and we’re excited to crack on with it. We’ve been nattering about it in the van a lot. We’ll kick it around a bit and see where we end up.”
Asked where they were looking to take their sound from here, Haycocks shared: “Currently, we’ve been really, really loving a band called Women, we’ve been listening to loads of The Magnetic Fields and we love The Drums, so we would hope that the next album is both poppier and weirder. You never, ever know how it’s going to turn out until you start doing it.
“We want to just continue the journey that we’ve done from the start. The way I described it to Paddy [Murphy, drummer] the other day was that ‘The mists were appearing’. You can’t quite see it yet, it’s not yet tangible what the second album will be but there’s a faint outline there.”
He added: “You describing us as ‘restless’ is a good descriptor. We really just want to get on it and go.”
‘It Goes On’ by Westside Cowboy is out now, with the band heading out on their biggest UK and European headline tour to date this autumn. Visit here for tickets and more information.
Check back at NME here for all the latest news, reviews, photos, interviews and more from Reading & Leeds 2026.
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