INJURY RESERVE - My Ghosts Go Ghost

By Storm's debut album makes clear that the project of the two surviving Injury Reserve members can start again five years after "By The Time I Get To Phoenix", while breaking away from that apocalyptic sound.

Producer Parker Corey and rapper RiTchie with a T have set out to process grief through a series of experiments built on the skeleton of hip-hop, borrowing liberally from the most eccentric singer-songwriter tradition, electronic folk, psychedelia and much more.

Abstract, melancholic and dramatic music that suggests rather than describes, leaving many questions unresolved: this is what happens after life's great sorrows, incomprehensible and hard to process.

The fragile “Can I Have You For Myself?” speaks to the difficulty of imagining oneself as a parent, of introducing a new person into the dynamics of a couple. “Just for a minute, can we soak it in and just tangle?”, RiTchie wonders.

A short melody repeats itself, spellbound, and a hip-hop beat only arrives after a good three minutes: the melancholic torpor turns into motion, a robotic clangor coexisting with the gentle guitar in the background.

From an obsessively repeated arpeggio springs the following “Dead Weight”, an anxiety-inducing crescendo where the plaintive opening vocal becomes a frantic reflection on identity and one's own path. As cacophonous breakbeats churn, the voices multiply and the soliloquy turns into an anguished dialogue, reinforced by the chorus:

That’s not in the picture

No, no, no, that’s not in the picture

It ain’t dead weight It ain’t dead weight

It’s not in the picture

No, no, no, it’s not in the picture

It ain’t dead weight

It ain’t dead weight

Crushed by the weight of loss, the track self-destructs, letting “Grapefruit” begin with nothing but a mournful beat. We're inside the rapper's chaotic mind, taken apart and put back together, warped and split in two in a nightmarish atmosphere. Images follow one another like a hallucinated stream of consciousness, where the human body split open becomes as appetizing as a juicy grapefruit.

After this triptych, “In My Town” spends seven minutes exploring the moral doubts of an independent artist, torn between tempting commercial offers (the gas cards offered by Live Nation are mentioned) and artistic integrity. A track that essentially touches the raw nerves of capitalism applied to art, “In My Town” floats in a psychedelic cloud, suspended, unreal, hypnagogic.

Another seven-minute track, “Zig Zag”, turns a children's nursery rhyme into a punch to the gut: however hard you try, there's no dodging the pain (“You ain’t dodge nothin’”). “Best Interest”, featuring Billy Woods, sinks mercilessly, with distorted sounds and paranoid verses, into the listener's mind.

The final triptych is more explosive: “Double Trio 2” opens with a burst of orchestral jazz, triumphant and surreal. A liberating assault that leads into the brightest closing statement, “And I Dance”, a carefree dance (“Dance with me, that’s all that we can do”) that nonetheless still echoes with death (“This what it feel like on the other side”).

In closing, Groggs' death is confronted head-on with “GGG”: the three consonants recall the friend but also serve as an acronym for “Ghosts Go Ghost”, as if the bond between the two had been severed forever. In processing grief, moving forward is a mix of liberation and longing, a second death that reveals itself day after day, as time passes and memories fade. “Don’t let me go, don’t let me go”, RiTchie repeats, as a piano plays a haunting melody, until the track is suddenly cut off: the conversation, then, remains unresolved.

“My Ghosts Go Ghost” manages to sound inventive and won't disappoint those who still regard “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” as an extraordinary album within this decade's experimental hip-hop. It's important to stress, though, that it sounds like something fundamentally different: an introspective journey through the later stages of grief, disorienting and moving. A difficult listen, one that rewards close attention to its fragmented, often free-form lyrics, much like our most intimate thoughts.

While the dense form, full of overlapping and distorted samples, dreamlike sounds and filtered vocals, might suggest comparisons to Dälek and Clipping, an emotional reading points more toward the bitter reflections of the aforementioned Billy Woods, and especially toward other albums dealing with grief, from “Skeleton Tree” to “Carrie & Lowell”, built on a very different musical language.

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02/03/2026