Trip-hop that doesn't dress in Bristol fog or flatten into playlist-friendly jazz-hop. In the hands of FRIZZY P & MR COLE, the form is handmade. Through worn-down samples, close confessions, smoky jazz, and boom-bap scaffolding, theirs is the kind of music best discovered at a low volume throughout your city's most discrete, clandestine backrooms.
Frizzy P is French-born and UK-raised. Mr Cole is a French-based producer and self-taught composer, who's also an alumnus of the international Tour de Manège collective. Her delivery moves between sung phrasing and rap cadence, carrying English-language soul and Lauryn Hill-esque fire. His production leans toward organic sample cutting and the beatmaker discipline of Illmatic-era Nas.
The duo met at a benefit concert associated with a festival project in Mali. She was then performing alone after the rest of her hip-hop trio couldn't attend, and Mr Cole suggested they work together. The collaboration took time to settle, partly because she was living in England, but the musical rapport returned when she came back to France.
FRIZZY P & MR COLE's first release was 2017's LADI DADI. Though it nods to Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh's 1985 classic "La Di Da Di," their version is no mere citation. Its sound sits downstream from Dummy-era Portishead and early-'90s boom-bap, with New Jack Swing and jazz-soul flickering across it all.
After a long gap, LADI DADI II dropped in March 2023. The EP sharpened the duo's melancholy, particularly on "Irish Coffee," which also features boom-bap and jazz-inflected production rooted in early-nineties hip-hop, New Jack Swing, and soul. In April of 2025, the trilogy closed with LADI DADI III.
In April 2024, the backrooms opened a side door with The Backroom Tape, a compact seven-track release of outtakes from the trilogy sessions. At just 15 minutes, it has found an especially strong following on YouTube.
Their latest release is "Forgotten" (Dramadôme, 2025), a standalone single. At just over two minutes, it also suits the duo's gift for creating emotion without resorting to grandiosity.
FRIZZY P & MR COLE now draws around 450,000 monthly Spotify listeners. "Blue," their early calling card, has passed twenty million streams, while "Mama Jay" has moved beyond ten million. Several tracks from The Backroom Tape, especially "Garden" and "Garage," have also travelled far beyond small-room aura. They sound underground because the music still carries the grain of independent making, but their audience has quietly become international.
For the LADI DADI III cycle, they have expanded the live formation, bringing additional musicians into a setup that had remained deliberately spare for years.
