Injury Reserve became By Storm. My Ghosts Go Ghost explains the name.

Look at how the new album is filed. On most services My Ghosts Go Ghost is credited to "By Storm & Injury Reserve", the merch and the Bandcamp page still sit at the old address, and our own catalog put the record under Injury Reserve without being asked. A band that genuinely wanted a clean break would not leave that many strings attached.

That's the interesting part. Ritchie with a T and Parker Corey retired the Injury Reserve name after Stepa J. Groggs died on 29 June 2020, at 32. They came back on 6 July 2023 as By Storm, taking the name from "Bye Storm", the closing track of the last Injury Reserve album. Not a new identity. A forwarding address.

The record that had to come first

By the Time I Get to Phoenix arrived in September 2021, self-released, after the Loma Vista debut had put them in front of a bigger audience than a Tempe art-rap trio had any business having. It's a difficult, deliberately unpleasant record: sessions Groggs was alive for, mixed into something that sounds like a signal degrading. Plenty of people call it the best rap album of its decade. Almost nobody puts it on casually.

It ends with "Bye Storm", which is Groggs' last verse on a finished song and the point where the whole project stops pretending it can carry on the way it was. Naming the next thing after that track is either the most sentimental move available or the most honest one. I think it's the second.

Five years, four singles, no album

The gap between "Double Trio" in August 2023 and My Ghosts Go Ghost in January 2026 was filled with singles, one at a time: "Zig Zag" in February 2025, "Double Trio 2" that April, "In My Town" in July, "And I Dance" two weeks before the album. Nine songs, forty-six minutes, produced by Corey and Nathaniel Ritchie, out on deadAir Records. Metacritic landed on 80; Pitchfork gave it a 7.0 and described a group working from hard-earned peace rather than crisis.

The band's own framing is worth quoting, because it's the opposite of what the discourse expected. They describe the album as being about new steps in life, reflection and the need to move forward, rather than existing purely as mourning. Five years on from Phoenix, that's the whole argument: grief that has stopped being the only subject in the room.

What a name change is actually for

Most bands change names to escape something. This one changed to keep something, which is rarer and harder to explain to an audience that has already decided what your loss means to them.

The obvious precedent is New Order, who became New Order because Joy Division had been four specific people and Ian Curtis was dead. They kept a rule about it: if any member left, the name would change again. What that did was strip the surviving members of the option to imitate themselves. By Storm made the same trade. Whatever they release now can be called good or bad, but it can't be graded against the ghost of a three-man group, because the two-man group has a different name on the sleeve.

There's a version of this where the change reads as erasure, and I understand why some fans got there. Groggs was the low, weathered voice, the counterweight to Ritchie's chattering flow, and the 2019 self-titled album is unimaginable without him. But erasure would have meant carrying on as Injury Reserve and quietly filling the gap. Retiring the name says the opposite: that particular band was three people and can't be reassembled.

Go back to Live from the Dentist Office from 2015, all jazz loops and inside jokes, made by three friends in a Phoenix scene nobody outside Arizona was writing about, and the distance is almost comic. The through-line isn't a sound. It's Corey producing like the mixing desk is an instrument with opinions, and a rapper who has never once sounded relaxed on a beat.

Where it sits in 2026

Experimental rap in 2026 is crowded with people doing damaged, difficult, expensive-sounding things, and a good half of them are downstream of By the Time I Get to Phoenix whether they'd say so or not. What separates My Ghosts Go Ghost is that it isn't trying to top that record's despair. It follows it, which is a much less flattering position and a much more interesting one.

If you like watching a band walk away from what worked, we keep a list of exactly that: transition albums, when a band becomes a different band. And Phoenix has a decent claim on the other list, the one about last records: swan songs.

So: is the name change honesty or a way of protecting a legacy from comparison? Is My Ghosts Go Ghost the better record or just the calmer one? Rate them both above and make the case underneath. The comments are the point.