Deciphering On the Radar Raps New Class Cypher (Vol. 1)

On the Radar Radio has spent a decade building a room where rappers say what they actually mean. Ten of them showed up, and the ones with the most to lose said the most.

Gabe P launched On the Radar Radio out of New York as an invite-only freestyle platform with no paid submissions and no co-sign economy, just a booth, a beat, and whoever he decided deserved the mic. Over a decade of running it that way, the platform built its name on finding rappers before the industry found them, or sometimes never finding them and putting them on record anyway: Polo G came through before the deal, local drill artists cut footage while they were still anonymous, and a long roll of unsigned artists got a camera on their face while everyone in their phone contacts was still calling them dreamers. Of course, everything changed, although we’ll reserve some criticism for another post. The New Class Cypher is a newer format, ten rappers in sequence on one beat, no host interstitials, no filler, and Ovrkast., who also raps on it, built the instrumental himself. MARCO PLUS, Reuben Vincent, Marlon Craft, Ben Reilly, SWAVAY, NAHSAAN, La Reezy, Ray Vaughn, and Chris Patrick fill the rest. Most of them have been at this long enough to know they should be further along, and the cypher is where that knowledge either sharpens into something or stays resentment.

Before the notoriety arrived, Reuben Vincent was at Mrs. Winner’s, mortified over a chicken dinner he could barely afford, and that single image earns everything built around it: the institutional neglect section moving through the FDA to pediatricians to poverty televised until the cycle looks like weather, and the Kanye line he closes with, “Who these kids gonna listen to?/I guess me, ‘cause it damn sure isn’t you.” He pulls that quote as a co-sign already earned rather than credibility borrowed. MARCO PLUS opens before him and has the same emotional material, a partner in a cell he owes commas to, a daughter to keep fresh, friends who call him brother while rooting for him to fail, and buried somewhere in the middle, “I took so many drugs ‘cause I ain’t really tryna feel.” That is the core of his verse, and it receives the same weight as everything around it.

Ovrkast. built the room and then rapped in it, which required finding something worth saying after already doing the structural work. He keeps it short and stays in the present tense: ICE on his morning timeline, Somalians targeted, white stones cycling through his neighborhood, a parenthetical (“Yeah, I made the beat, too”). Marlon Craft comes in behind him carrying a decade. The Pete Rose comparison frames the verse from the jump, bet on yourself hard enough in this game and they will find a reason to ban you, and the genealogy bars that follow are the most technically precise moment on the full recording: “There’s no you without me, you in my family tree/Or make us hit your whole style with the twenty-three and me.” He is accusing people who benefited from his influence of intellectual lineage and folding a plagiarism claim into a DNA metaphor without ever becoming a complaint. “This ain’t AI, I got this good from practicing” may be the most precisely dated line on this cypher.

Our friendly neighborhood Ben Reilly arrives. “He chimed in and got left hanging” is the cypher’s tightest compression, and the verse keeps the rate up through the bear/bare knuckle doubling, “do not test Damon,” the Sydney Sweeney coupe, a punchline architecture that keeps most listeners half a bar behind. Then his partner died before he was twenty-one. His grandmother has dementia, and he converts that directly into a defense against anyone misremembering how things went between them: “When you go and jog your memory, this wrong what you remember.” The verse stays honest about its own methods: “I can’t be hiding rap disses under profound words.” In a format where most rappers brag or confess, Reilly does both. SWAVAY goes somewhere else entirely. His whole verse is addressed to God, not as reverence but as a conversation with someone he knows well enough to be honest with, admitting he robbed someone for a Mac in 2017 and that person later sent a feature, that his chain costs an Acura, that he does not believe in manifestation because chasing signs is like acknowledging God while refusing to ever dap Him up. His girlfriend got annoyed at a Mariah the Scientist line mid-verse, he clocked the tension, wrote it in, and kept going. The prayer at the close asks God to just let him drop this year is the most human moment on the cypher.

Proof’s son NAHSAAN calls out Revolt and Rob Markman by name, on camera, saying any rankings of the hardest young rappers that skip the young rappers are agenda-driven and paid. The grievance is specific, the targets are named, and the willingness to lodge it publicly in a room where the footage is already rolling is harder than most of what surrounds it. What follows is weaker: LeBron, Michael Jackson, reborn, hypothetical opponents ready to swing. West Seven Mile to the Bluff is where the verse actually lives, and the bars that do not touch Detroit need more evidence than they carry. La Reezy is twenty-one, recently engaged, just turned the age he is rapping from, and he decided early in his verse that posture was the correct bet to make before the catalog could fully back it. “I don’t even need Gabe to confirm that I’m on the radar, ‘cause I’m the lightsaber” is his best line, using the platform’s own name to reject dependence on it, and the lightsaber swap is goofy enough that a cleaner version would stick less. The hurricane metaphor for his ten-month impact is a claim rather than a case, and at twenty-one, that may still be the right move.

“I do a whole lot of straightening, might as well put me on a S-curl box.” That line sits halfway through Ray Vaughn’s verse (he absolutely steals the show), and everything before and after it is about exactly that cost. He opens with Black history and photographers protecting his image, managing representation before he says what he came to say, then moves into what the straightening requires: white feet on the culture, emulate the blueprint, monetize the movement, discard the humans. It has been said before in this genre, but Vaughn delivers it as a live account rather than a cultural citation, and the difference is audible. “I bust down my AP and still screaming, ‘Fuck ICE!’” drops personal luxury and political rage into the same bar without staging the irony. He kisses his daughters before he leaves the house. His circle is compact because he pruned it deliberately. “It’s my week” at the close carries everything that happened with his name in it during the spring of 2025—the Joey Bada$$ orbit, REASON, all of it—and it draws a line after absorbing months of unsolicited noise. Nothing else here is as fully inhabited from first bar to last.

And we have one of our rappers to watch this year, Chris Patrick closes it out with some personal bars: “My mama sometimes fearful she gon’ end up like her mama/Multiple sclerosis diagnosis, an obstacle/According to the CDC, there still ain’t no cure for it.” Doing the impossible is not a pose here. It is the actual assignment. The Nas approval stamp, the JID tour where the merch moved while his stomach was still grumbling, and four months of output outrunning what other rappers built over careers. These are coordinates of a career in motion mapped.