The oddball Phoenix trio Injury Reserve seem more like a random selection of three customers at a Zumiez store than a rap group. Their true origin story isn’t that far off: rapper Ritchie With a T moved to the city with his mom so she could launch a Vans store there, and that’s where he met Stepa J. Groggs, who was an employee. Their imaginative 23-year-old producer Parker Corey, a swim-team captain who only got into beat-making when an injury kept him from competing, is so green that Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is the first rap album he ever listened to in full. A tinkerer without limits, he’s sampled everything from K-pop idol group f(x) to bebop trailblazer Donald Byrd. Without a rap scene in Phoenix, they played house parties with punk bands, and their debut album is an attempt to make something uniquely modern of all this incongruity.
Their breakthrough mixtape, 2015’s Live From the Dentist Office, which was literally recorded in the office of Corey’s DDS grandfather, was a foray into jazzy alt-rap that threatened to define them, and they’ve subsequently pushed back hard against it. “I say this ain’t jazz-rap; this that spazz-rap/This that raised-by-the-internet, ain’t-had-no-dad rap,” Ritchie explains on “Oh Shit!!!” from the 2016 follow-up tape Floss. Since then, they’ve continued to move outward into weirder sounds without sacrificing their inherent smoothness. “There’s people that can make really accessible music, and there’s people who can make experimental music, but there’s only a handful of people who can do both,” Ritchie told Billboard. They aim to join this handful, making noise music that still scans as pop.
Despite their pursuit of the avant garde, neither Ritchie nor Stepa are particularly groundbreaking MCs. Both are straight-talk rappers that rap a lot about rapping. And yet they’re regularly shown up by their own guests, whether it’s Rico Nasty annihilating them on “Jawbreaker” or Freddie Gibbs slashing through “Wax On” with surgical precision. Neither rap anything as memorable across the entire album as Aminé’s bars on “Jailbreak the Tesla”: “Your engine go ‘Vroom’ and my engine go—/Elon on them shrooms/And Grimes voice gon’ be the GPS.” Ritchie and Stepa are best when playing off each other, and they both have a genuine feel for making the most out of Corey’s productions.
Much of their boundary pushing is reliant on Corey. He doesn’t know enough about hip-hop to be following any traditional producer blueprints; a child of white suburbia, his rap plug was YouTube. The beats he makes are the endgame of an alternate rap universe where MBDTF is the Big Bang. His productions put premiums on maximalism and feats of curation; he draws inspiration from Arca and follows bread crumb trails to bizarre landing places. This is the cornerstone of the Injury Reserve brand: rap music that isn’t beholden to rap conceits, or, put frankly, rap for people who don’t listen to much other rap. The group is signed to Loma Vista, a primarily indie rock-focused label, and Corey made a beat enthusiastically sampling Dory Previn’s Mythical Kings and Iguanas for Mass Appeal’s “Rhythm Roulette” series wearing Mitski merch from Bury Me at Makeout Creek.
When Corey is at his most inventive, Injury Reserve feels remarkably fresh and singular. On “Jailbreak the Tesla,” he scraps “Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious)” by the Teriyaki Boyz for parts and turns a supercar garage into a strobing nightclub. “Rap Song Tutorial” deconstructs one of their own songs only to reconstruct it as a primer for other would-be rappers. The guitar tune-up that opens “Best Spot in the House” becomes the crunch for a glitchy, wailing synth trance. His talent and vision can make Ritchie and Stepa seem like true originals. Too often, though, Injury Reserve gets stuck between its experimental urges and its pop ambitions. In searching for a happy medium, it’s never quite noisy enough or quite catchy enough.
