The Lacs are coming back to Bend.

A little more than a year after the hick-hop duo featuring Brian “Rooster” King and Clay “Uncle Snap” Sharpe headlined the Domino Room, they will graduate to the bigger Midtown Ballroom for their return Saturday. That upgrade shows country rap’s increasing prominence on the musical landscape nationally but especially in Bend (Yelawolf recently performed here, and fellow country rappers Demun Jones and Struggle Jennings are on their way in the next few months).

As the genre The Lacs helped pioneer in the early 2000s continues to grow, the Georgia duo continues its fierce independence and musical experimentation on “Rise and Shine,” their ninth studio album in as many years. Sharpe chatted from a tour stop in Reno, Nevada, about the new music, the duo’s early days and how their albums are like ’90s mixtapes.

Q: Are you guys excited to be coming back? Any stories from past times you’ve played here?

A: It’s always a good crowd anywhere we play in Oregon, man. It’s kind of wild the first time we came to this part of the country because we didn’t know how people would take us. But it’s kind of cool to see that there’s just as many rednecks in the Northwest as there are in the Southeast where we live.

Q: When you guys do end up in a new spot of the country where you haven’t been, is there always that trepidation of not being sure how people will take you guys? Especially with what you guys do, because it’s not straight country; it’s not straight hip-hop; it’s not straight rock.

A: Yeah, for sure man, we’re always a little nervous when we go to a new place just because of that. You never know how people’s gonna accept us because certain venues have their hardcore country fans that come in there every week, and then some venues are all about the rap, and we’re somewhere in between all of that and Southern rock. And like I said, it is different. It’s not for everybody, and we understand that. So yeah, we do get a little nervous coming into new areas.

Q: I would imagine, since you guys began to now, that’s also changed. What you guys do has become a little bit more accepted — there are more country rap artists coming up now.

A: It’s a lot more accepted now than when we first started in 2001. We used to have to just play straight-up country saloons on a Friday night and then straight-up rap shows on Saturday night because there wasn’t really any market for this when we started.

Q: Tell me about those early years meeting Brian and getting this going. How did you hit on this style?

A: I don’t know; it was just our love of music, man. Growing up in the time we grew up in — being born in the ’80s, growing up in the ’90s — I still feel like the ’90s was the most broad 10-year period of music ever, that’s ever gonna be. We call it the mixtape era, where if you sit down at your computer to make a mixtape — mix CD — you didn’t do a whole country album; you didn’t do a whole rap album; you didn’t do a whole rock album. You threw (on) three or four songs of every genre that you liked, and that’s what was cool about the mix era. We always wanted to make music like that because you feel different moods. You don’t want your whole album to just be one mood or one style of music. We never wanted that anyway.

Q: Tell me about who you worked with and the writing and recording process for “Rise and Shine.”

A: Well we’re kind of all over the place with the writing and recording process. … Sometimes we record (in) out-of-state studios; sometimes we have a day off and just go rent one and do some recording. Sometimes we write with our band; sometimes it’s actually the producers that make the music we write with. We don’t really have a set way that we write songs. Sometimes me and Brian will send them back and forth via text message while we’re writing; sometimes we’re in the same room. Like I said, sometimes it just might be a group of us on the bus — sit down with a guitar and just start writing.

Q: “Bottle on a Shelf” and “High School Hallways” both seem a little bit different for you guys. Can you tell me about creating those songs?

A: That was one of our buddies that produced that, Wess Nyle. He’s a great producer. He leans more towards the rock and hip-hop as you can hear with those sounds. He just made those two tracks. He collabed with Sonny Bama on “High School Hallways” and we got Danny Boone from Rehab to sing on it, and that just came together nice. “Bottle on a Shelf,” it has a little different feel than what we’ve ever done before just because of all the singing harmonies encrypted in the beat itself. It adds almost like a Timbaland feel to us, so we knew we wanted to record on it as soon as the first time we heard it.

Q: That song seems a bit more introspective than some of your other material. What is it about?

A: We make a lot of drinking songs; we make a lot of partying songs, but not everybody associates the drinking with partying like we do. For some people, drinking means something completely different — completely different feelings —so we just wanted to make a broad song and let some people have their take on what they thought it meant. Some people struggle with having that bottle on a shelf every day, and some people embrace it. So we just wanted to take a look at both sides writing that song and just put a little of both perspectives in there.

— Brian McElhiney, The Bulletin