By Storm: 'We had to earn being a real band'
After pouring 10 years into Injury Reserve, Parker Corey and RiTchie forced themselves to start from scratch and took nothing for granted with the debut of By Storm.
It took ten years for Parker Corey and RiTchie to become stars. As two-thirds of Injury Reserve, the producer and rapper from Arizona were finally seeing the fruits of their labour while working on the band’s much-anticipated second album By The Time I Get To Phoenix around the start of the pandemic. Then, their childhood friend and bandmate Stepa J. Groggs — the ultra-charismatic lyrical leader of Injury Reserve — died at age 32.
In the six years that have passed, Corey and RiTchie have done (and I suspect continue to) do their mourning. They have politely shut down many probing questions from strangers in interviews, and rebuffed well-intentioned fan theories about songs that may or may not be dedicated to Groggs.1 They have also tried to strike an immensely challenging balance between moving on from the immense shadow of their friend’s death without leaving behind his legacy.
That’s where By Storm comes in. Taking its name from Injury Reserve’s final song, By Storm is the new moniker for RiTchie and Parker Corey’s joint musical project. First announced in August 2023, the pair have taken the long road to their just-released debut project My Ghosts Go Ghost.
“Trust me, we’ve been wanting to do this, but you want to do it right,” Parker Corey tells me over Zoom from his home in Phoenix.
One of the central concerns, Corey and RiTchie explained, was that no one knew who they were outside of Injury Reserve, a band they spent a decade trying to establish.
“We would be playing shows and leaving venues, and people would see us and be like, ‘Oh, are you the guys from Injury Reserve?’, and we’d be like, ‘We just played your show here a couple hours ago’,” Corey said.
In the three years between By Storm’s unveiling and the arrival of My Ghosts Go Ghost, Corey and RiTchie worked relentlessly to grow their world and shepherd fans from Injury Reserve to the band’s next iteration. RiTchie released a solo album (2024’s Triple Digits [112]) while Corey shot music videos (caroline, Jane Remover) and a full-length film (yet to be released). In the background, By Storm started taking shape.
“It was definitely worth it, because it did take some people quite a while to even realise what was happening in regards to this band being a real thing and a record coming,” Corey said. “It was really cool to feel like we had to earn being a real band. We weren’t entitled to just drop a record right away and be like, ‘Okay, take us seriously now’.”
The art is better for the wait, as well. Corey’s production has always been a richly textured melee of sounds, but this record is his strongest display of control, restraint and release. My Ghosts Go Ghost has more soft edges than any Injury Reserve project, which only makes the glitchy breakdowns and synth blasts hit that much harder.
“This album could have had so many crazy transitions between the songs and stupid shit like that,” Corey says. “But I was really trying to force clarity upon what we were doing, which is way more difficult. It took a lot longer.
“Now, are there things that maybe would bore people coming to it, even from just off of Phoenix, where it’s more immediately shocking?” he asks rhetorically. “I’m very proud of that stuff, but I don’t want to make that album again.”
Lyrically, RiTchie is more direct and personal than he’s ever been. He opens the record on the cusp of becoming a father, writing to his partner about his fears, excitement and anxieties. Elsewhere, RiTchie is scribbling lines down between doing food deliveries to make ends meet. It’s raw, human, and an unglamorous candour we rarely see from artists.
It’s the third dimension to the rapper who described his role in Injury Reserve as that of the “world-builder”. Next to Groggs, he was like the leadoff hitter who could set the table for his partner in crime. On his solo project, RiTchie showed range: he grew comfortable as the frontman, even stepping up to the plate to rap against veteran lyricist Quelle Chris. The RiTchie we see in By Storm feels like a natural fusion of his prior versions, an ethereal presence who can float over or fight through the production as needed.
“I don’t think that I would have been able to jump back into it if I didn’t take on my true challenge of doing the solo record, because that was a big thing that I really wanted and needed to do,” RiTchie says, joining the Zoom from his sofa. “I think that, if I hadn’t put myself in that mindset, I wouldn’t be able to do something like ‘Double Trio 2’.
‘Double Trio 2’ is the emotional epicentre of My Ghosts Go Ghost. The song refurbishes two lines from Injury Reserve’s Groggs tribute ‘Bye Storm’, turning it into an anthemic hook. The first time we heard RiTchie rap the lines, “We was caught by storm and we ain’t even know it/To you, this shit knee-high” in 2021 he sounded despondent and shrunk into the lines.
Here, on ‘Double Trio 2’, it’s euphoric. It’s flanked by some of the best rapping of RiTchie’s career. He’s commanding with a deceptively slippery flow, delivering an enrapturing verse that always feels on the verge of hitting breathlessness.
“Sometimes these beats just deserve as good of rapping as possible,” RiTchie says.
“The original version of ‘Grapefruit’ was a lot more like [Injury Reserve album] Phoenix, but actually in a bad way, where the song would have been way significantly worse. And I had to take a step back and be like, ‘If there was a guest feature on this, how would this be approached?’”
RiTchie adds that he thinks ‘Grapefruit’ isn’t as good as it probably could have been, which mirrors something I’ve noticed over my two conversations with him. RiTchie is a meticulously harsh self-marker. A few minutes prior, RiTchie caveats a comment about his solo record by saying it was “far from perfect”, and when we spoke in 2024 he mentions his fondness for one of his songs over another despite the latter being “a better song”.
There’s a synergy between RiTchie’s relentless self-evaluation and the tenacity with which Parker Corey approaches art. When I ask Corey about an essay he wrote on the French filmmaker Maurice Pialat, in which he professes to admire Pialat’s “bitterness”, Corey offers a measured but sharp dig at “some of [his] peers”.
“I’m not perfect by any means, but there are certain things that are just such bullshit,” he says, pointing to ‘songs that take 20 minutes to blend together’.
“You sell it. It just sells to people. It sells to people who want to feel smarter than other people and like they have better tastes and you know how to push their buttons and fill their ego. There’s just a lot of bullshit, but it’s fine.”
Corey admits it requires some dissonance to say all of this and then trumpet his own work, but there’s something charming about By Storm’s unapologetic belief in their vision. Of course, if you’re going to talk your shit, you need to back it up, and on My Ghosts Go Ghost, By Storm do. To paraphrase a great man — with their backs against the wall, they came out swinging.
‘My Ghosts Go Ghost’ is out now via Dead Oceans. Purchase on Bandcamp or stream here.
“People think ‘Top Pick For You is about him — that boy was alive and well when that song was made” RiTchie said in a brilliant 2021 Passion of the Weiss interview.
I’m always so awed by your writing you are incredible