By Storm Emerge From The Ashes of Injury Reserve Reborn on My Ghosts Go Ghost

Design By Diego Gonzalez

By Lucca Swain

At this point in their career, By Storm, composed of rapper RiTchie with a T and producer Parker Corey — both formerly of the group Injury Reserve — are a duo defined almost as much by the mythology surrounding their music as the music itself. Since the 2021 release of Injury Reserve’s earth shattering By The Time I Get to Phoenix and the group’s subsequent dissolution/reformation into By Storm, it’s become common practice to wax poetic about their music’s innate connection to grief, about how the sporadic, confrontational sound of that final record so effectively embodied the devastation of post-mortem anguish like little hip-hop before it ever could — and that’s not denying that By The Time I Get to Phoenix was anything but an album about grief. 

After all, RiTchie and Corey are only two thirds of the original Injury Reserve lineup; Phoenix was released in August 2021, just over a year after the death of fellow member Stepa J. Groggs, and in comparison to their previous, more spirited efforts, played out more like a post-modern obituary, a fractured comet flaming through the digisphere towards oblivion. Listening to Phoenix is like hearing the old Injury Reserve formula, but shattered into a thousand little pieces, samples twisted and stretched like molten glass, lyrics encoded in dadaist mantras, let loose in menacing, pitch-adjusted whispers or pained wails. Only occasionally is the listener allowed in on the source of the immense woe that permeates the record, most notably on “Top Picks for You,” where Injury Reserve pinpoint the gut wrenching feeling of realizing that your loved ones have already been immortalized by the algorithm, that a facsimile of their person is embedded forever inside of a machine that possesses no understanding of death, that knows humans only by way of their content preferences — “Your pattern’s still in place, algorithm’s still in action/ Just work so you could jump right back/ I see that shit working like nothing ever happened.” Or there’s the gut punch that is “Knees,” where a final verse from Groggs himself makes its way through the din, his words ringing out with grim clarity — “Okay, this one is my last one/ Probably said that about the last one/ Probably gon’ say it about the next two” — as he laments his struggles with addiction over a Black Midi sample flip.

As a whole project, Phoenix is an awe-inspiring feat of emotional and technical cohesion, music that affects the soul as much as it befuddles the ears. And despite its relatively challenging content and presentation, the album was received with open arms by the people and the critics alike. It isn’t hard to see how a work so singular would inspire a fascination with the tragic circumstances that birthed its creation, or how that collective romanticisation of grief could potentially typify the group that made it as being nothing more than experimental hip-hop’s “sad” group. In channeling a feeling as massive as grief into art, there’s always the risk that it can overrun the artist; play your cards a little too well, and you may come out the other side with your artistic identity inextricably bound to the very thing you were trying to leave behind.

All that is to say that on My Ghosts Go Ghosts, the first official release from By Storm, RiTchie and Parker Corey prove that they’re already five steps beyond whatever people thought they were. If By The Time I Get to Phoenix was the sound of a whole violently breaking apart, Ghosts is the aftermath, the pieces fused back together and cooled into a shape not dissimilar to its original form. The music on the duo’s latest offering lives in a different headspace than its predecessor, the emotional peaks and valleys less manic but more sustained, the production more tethered to earth but still no less idiosyncratic. “Zig Zag” sees RiTchie contemplate the present moment in half-thoughts, his non sequiturs paralleled by a beat that lies closer sonically to the work of Autechre than any standard hip-hop production. The song alternates indiscriminately between minimal, slowcore-esque acoustics and folktronic freak-out, though where the group’s past work would have reached a frenzied sonic peak, here it maintains a consistent, somber momentum for the entirety of the song’s runtime. Many of the longer tracks on Ghosts possess a similarly atmospheric quality, allowing the music to wander and the mood to simmer without the pressure to reach for any sort of catharsis. “Best Interest” is probably the album’s most standard moment, with a feature in the form of Billy Woods, who slides a free improvisational verse over a surreal miasma of noises that may or may not approximate a combination of buzzsaws, erasers on a chalkboard, and vaporwave samples. A cool combination of sounds, for sure, but it may also be the record’s weakest track solely because both RiTchie and Woods are mixed to sound like they’re being smothered by the beat. Turn them up!

“In My Town” takes the album’s atmospheric hip-hop experiments to their logical extreme, the first half of the song a sobering reflection by RiTchie on the reality of financial stability as both an artist and a new father (“Your favorite rapper at your door now/ If you wanna skip the fees, you can call now”), before the second half dissolves into the void, an eerie symphony of gloomy pads, chopped and screwed acoustic guitars, and chipmunked vocal samples trailing in and out of reality for three whole minutes, as if a darkness is attempting to subsume the music throughout the entirety of its runtime. It’s a track that’s more than anything representative of the unusual history of the By Storm project, with a standalone single, “Double Trio,” released in 2023, followed by a half of Ghost’s tracklist being released as singles over the course of 2025. In between all of that, RiTchie and Corey were on the road touring relentlessly, as any artist must in an era where artists make pennies off of streaming and rely almost entirely on merch and concert sales to survive. The songs they made in the wake of Stepa J. Grogg’s passing became their financial lifeblood; while By Storm slowly materialized on the bylines, single by single, that digital malaise so intrinsic to Phoenix manifested itself in the physical — the memories of their friend as valuable as they were necessary to pay the bills. “In My Town” plays like the culmination of all the pent-up frustration that the duo have accrued over the past few years of nonstop grinding, an ethereal, languorous dirge wafting up like black smoke from the embers of what was once Injury Reserve.

But it would also be a lie to characterize My Ghosts Go Ghost as nihilistic. Truthfully, the album is so striking primarily because of how stubbornly optimistic it is; even at Ghost’s grimmest, By Storm never lingers on the past, never frames their history as anything but another step in reaching the present moment. That comes into focus most clearly in the record’s final leg, beginning with the magnetic “Double Trio 2,” a direct sequel to By Storm’s first single of the same name (without the 2). It’s a radical vibe change, to say the least, not hesitating to blast the listener with a titanic, euphoric wall of sound(s) right off the bat, though while in one moment the unrelenting janky synths and glitched-out nu-jazz sample chops may startle or overwhelm, in the next they feel like a shot of adrenaline direct to the veins. “Shit, we was caught by storm and we ain’t even know it/ To you this shit knee-high; to him it’s to his shoulders,” he raps, a line pulled directly from the closing track of By The Time I Get to Phoenix, and from which the group also draws their name. But while the old Injury Reserve, the one on “Bye Storm,” still seemed caught entirely within the eye of the hurricane even as they seemed to emerge from the fog, “Double Trio 2” is a whole leap forward, an acknowledgement that grief never truly leaves, but only takes new forms. Sounds-wise, though, the track is like a big, kinetic ball of energy, moving at a hundred miles per hour and practically screaming in your face to get up and move, go somewhere, do something. Exhilarating, for sure.

And even as the shadow of death hovers over their music, the duo proves that they still have their old penchant for the subversive in closer “GGG,” wherein lies the simplest yet most affecting lyrical content and production on the whole record — RiTchie’s raps about Groggs are never clearer in intention than when he lets loose, “I tried to move on, but little I know that I needed my bro.” The “ghost” in the album’s name is more present than ever here, haunting the basement, the shadows, the memories of the past and possibilities of the future. The melancholy sets in, strings bolstering RiTchie’s half-hearted pleas of “Don’t let me go,” and then, just as you become fully acclimated to the vibe that By Storm have so masterfully conjured up, the track abruptly cuts out mid-bar. Like the best things in life, it doesn’t last. And like death, it comes unexpectedly — in an instant. We enjoy the beautiful things while they are, they burn with righteous fury for a singular moment in time, and then they’re gone. But they were there all the same.