Injury Reserve makes some of the most anarchic rap music you can find, but they still have to do regular shit like wait for the air conditioning repairman. The pair—consisting of rapper-producer Ritchie With a T and producer Parker Corey—is sitting in a small room in Ritchie’s house in Arizona, plotting the upcoming tour behind sophomore album By the Time I Get to Phoenix over water and matcha while they wait. Their shows require more prep than most to accommodate both their elaborate stage setups (think blinding strobe lights and beat machines with endless cords) and the disassembled and rearranged mixes for each song in their set. But there is one shift that no amount of planning can account for: the sudden death of founding member Stepa J. Groggs on June 29, 2020, at age 32.
“For most of our friend group, Groggs was our first major loss,” Ritchie explains over Zoom. “At our age, no one ever expects it to be one of your peers.” To fans and peers alike, Groggs was both a ball of energy and a grounding force when necessary, his raps packed with humor and hard-earned pathos. Paired with Ritchie’s quick-witted rhymes and Corey’s beats, Injury Reserve established themselves under strange constraints. Their breakout projects, 2015’s Live From the Dentist Office and 2016’s Floss, were recorded after hours in Corey’s grandfather’s old dental office. Their early work was heavily informed by groups like A Tribe Called Quest, OutKast, and the Cool Kids, but even at their most traditional, Corey’s beats would bend, pop, and melt like deep-fried memes turned into GIFs, while Ritchie and Groggs surfed their unpredictable waves.
The trio strayed further toward the fringes with their 2019 self-titled album, which came together during marathon recording sessions in Flagstaff, AZ, and outside of Prague in the Czech Republic. The plan was inspired by Kanye West’s infamous Hawaii sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and the album reveled in a similar maximalism as West’s. Songs would mutate and break the fourth wall with tongue-in-cheek commentary on fashion (“Jawbreaker”) and the art of making a rap song (“Rap Song Tutorial”). The album was their first for prominent indie label Loma Vista, and their growing success only pushed them to get weirder.
The self-titled album received a mixed reception, but it allowed them to embark on a massive tour across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Oceania throughout 2019. That tour included an impromptu show in the back of a cramped Italian restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden, with little more than “two PA speakers and a set of CDJs,” as Corey remembers. Their set morphed into a live DJ mix where the trio transitioned from “Athens, France” by the English post-punk group Black Country, New Road into a new, unfinished track that sampled it. Before that night, the demo was merely a beat and some reference vocals. After, it was the first song completed for By the Time I Get to Phoenix, the skeleton of what would become “Superman That.” “The sound guy recorded a one-track of the performance to GarageBand,” Ritchie remembers, “and once we heard that, we knew we had something special.”
Work on Phoenix flowed at a steady rate well into 2020, with the bulk of the recordings completed before Groggs’ death blindsided the group. The words “organic” and “spontaneous” come up often as the group explains their creative approach to navigating rap’s fringes, looking for parts unknown. “A lot of the songs for this record were sent to me when my mic was on, so I could get my initial gut reaction to it,” Ritchie says. “Parker created an environment where we were just doing whatever excited us.”
This was especially the case for Groggs, who was usually the last person to record verses for any particular Injury Reserve song. He laid down vocals for Phoenix highlight “Knees” and Aminé’s “Fetus” on the same day. Both of Groggs’ verses deal with heavy themes in his usual blunt and humorous way, which Ritchie appreciates now more than anything. “Groggs saying, ‘Fuck it, nigga. At least my dreads grew’ really sums up what [“Knees”] is about,” he says. “In the early stages of making the song, you could hear me reacting to his verse live. There’s one part where you can hear me go mmm.”
The duo’s spontaneous energy also affected how early album highlight “Footwork in a Forest Fire”' came together. Drum and cymbal samples simmer on the song’s intro before Groggs’ distorted screams reverberate across a footwork beat turned inside out. Parker and Groggs first recorded the song in a hotel room in Melbourne, Australia, and when Nate got the track, he was blown away by Groggs’ intro: “I was like ‘What the fuck is this?’ I had never heard Groggs that untapped before. I went from being dumbfounded to knowing exactly what I wanted to do.”
The overall sound of Phoenix pulled from influences both inside and outside their orbit. Morgan Simpson (of UK rock band black midi) and Jack Latham (aka Jam City) have production credits on “Outside” and “Top Picks for You,” respectively. The work of producer-musician Slauson Malone, who toured with the group in 2019, was also a substantial influence on Injury Reserve’s evolving wall of sound. But according to both Ritchie and Corey, Malone changed their perspective further by introducing them to the work of writer Mark Fisher, particularly his book Ghosts of My Life. “His writing is very theoretical and political but also very connected to music. It really unpacks the political implications of music being weird and the necessity of that,” Corey explains. Ritchie directly connects Fisher’s theories on hauntology, a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida that Fisher uses to describe a tangible sense of nostalgia in music, to the algorithms-as-ghosts narrative of Phoenix’s “Top Picks for You.” “I’ve been trying to articulate that concept [of hauntology] for years,” he admits.
As excited as the group was about By the Time I Get to Phoenix, their label didn’t necessarily agree. The day before they began the mixing and mastering process with Zeroh this year, Loma Vista expressed doubts about the album’s direction. Unwilling to make changes, Injury Reserve’s members decided to move forward with the record as independent artists. Suddenly, they—and their ever-growing musical community—were all they had. The joy of artistic freedom is ultimately what Injury Reserve wants listeners to take away from By the Time I Get to Phoenix. Groggs’ death may loom over the album, but these songs are also fun and loose, filled with references to late-’90s Will Smith movies, Marvel’s Silver Surfer, and jokes about 5G tower conspiracies. The beats, though sometimes ominous, retain the cheeky kitchen-sink quality that Corey first brought to them in his grandfather’s office.
Eight years into the group’s lifespan and with their future in flux, Phoenix nonetheless represents a creative breakthrough, resulting in their most challenging and rewarding music to date. “I don’t even think it’s just different,” Parker says. “Our current music is more honest about what it takes to make art—aware of the connections and complexities, the mess of making music.”
Ritchie: I keep saying that when people ask about the record. It may be sad to some, but it’s really a lot of fucking around at the same time. Obviously, songs like “Top Picks for You” and “Bye Storm” aren’t so much fun, even though “Storm” has that shrug and looking ahead aspect to it, but everything was really fun. On the writing tip, I had to do that to be inspired. I kinda needed that spark. I’m so deep into recording that it’s hard for me to just write a regular 16-bar rap verse or rap about rapping. While two of our most personal songs are on this album, a lot of it is our most impersonal work to date. A lot of it comes from these characters that we informally created as jokes within our friend group.
Ritchie: I think we’ve done a good job of just letting things be what they are, even internally. We like making things that are like the beginning of a conversation; not everything is 100 percent a statement. That’s a big hill to get to in terms of writing.
Having discussions with people with less of an emotional attachment to us, that’s been really interesting. We had a session with ZelooperZ and Maxo, and I played them “Postpostpartum” and then told them the concept on it. They both specifically said they liked the song way more before they knew what it was about. That changed my whole process. I was ready to just let things be. And we don’t know them like that, so they meant that shit.
Parker: “Superman That” was pretty much an accident. But even then, we realized it was something special. I was trying to force it onto people; I sent it to [JPEGMAFIA] at one point.
Ritchie: The original idea was for someone to do straightforward rapping on it.
Parker: Once [“Superman That”] was solidified, we did that U.S. tour with Slauson Malone and Body Meat. We were fans of their music enough to ask them to join us, but even something like Slauson offering us readings on the tour and a certain world of books that I hadn’t really tapped into before—it felt like a community that made sense to what we’d been trying to approach from the outside. Finding other people who had their own tips and tricks with operating in that way was cool.
Parker: Since the songs were less classically structured in the hook-verse-hook-verse-bridge sense, it became a situation where there were less spots left open [for verses]. Typically, he’d take the longest with writing his verses. Some of the last parts of finishing albums would be him recording his verses. For [Phoenix], his two features on here were, far and away, the most on-the-spot reactive things he’s ever recorded. I think that’s part of the reason why they’re some of our favorite verses of his. There was a song that had a spot where there were plans for him to record a verse. I wouldn’t be shocked if there were a few more songs where he tried something, and it would turn out sick, considering how we work on songs and they evolve.
Ritchie: Just because he’s not on wax doesn’t mean he wasn’t a part of the process of everything, because he was. Sometimes, you blink, and things happen so quickly and organically, and you know a song is done and doesn’t need anymore. People in other situations might’ve tried to splice shit up and put him on other things to exploit the situation or be insecure about how it looks from the outside. We’ve never been an act that would do something like that.
Parker: I remember people, especially [friend and collaborator melikxyz], latching onto “Bye Storm” as a point of comfort. If anything, for the friend group, some of us were coming back to some of the songs. Listening to “Knees” and hearing his voice again, while everyone thinks of it as sad now, we were almost coming to it for the same thing. It was raw because we had it on our phones.
Ritchie: We were listening to the songs for living, as opposed to any sort of creative or professional reason. We weren’t even thinking about that at the time.
Parker: Peers we’d hope would love it have shown that they do, and that’s all the external validation we need.
Ritchie: It’s less a “fuck everyone else” thing and more that we knew we made this album for the right reasons. This may not be for everyone, but at the same time, it articulates so much of what we’ve been working towards but haven’t been able to nail perfectly. Now people are going to see us in a light that we want to be seen in. The thing that differentiated us from the jump was our mindset. We never felt like we were a part of any particular sound or way; we just knew we had this mindset that would influence every project. This time, we’re at the point where we can give into that and not worry about anything else.
Parker: This might sound like a coy, difficult answer, but the first thing we do is go on tour. Not just going and performing shows in cities, but that’s the most intensive practice of being in Injury Reserve. From waking up to going to sleep, you’re in a band. Like, really really. Knowing what Injury Reserve is like now that [Groggs] has passed, we have to do that before we’re able to make a considered judgment on what we’d want to do.
Ritchie: Between the two of us, I do feel like we’re just catching our groove. As far as the group called Injury Reserve and this album, we’ve always presented this situation as something we need to see out. When we were living out of the van for 24 hours on tour [in 2019], that was the most time we spent with Groggs ever. We’re all grown, and we’ve moved to different places, so touring and sound-checking and being at the hotels and eating before and after the shows is the most time we spend together as grown men. A lot of those situations that will make things real haven’t even happened yet. We’ll have way more of an understanding of how we feel after we’ve been on the road without him.
