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**Injury Reserve - "Injury Reserve"**
★★★★☆

There's something deeply unsettling about listening to *Injury Reserve*, the Arizona trio's self-titled third album, knowing it would be their last with Stepa J. Groggs. The rapper's sudden death in June 2020, just eight months after the album's release, casts a shadow over what is already their darkest and most experimental work. But to view this record solely through the lens of tragedy would be to miss its radical ambition – this is hip-hop pushed to its breaking point, then reassembled into something entirely new.

The group's journey to this point reads like a fever dream of internet-age success. Ritchie With a T and Parker Corey started making beats in their Phoenix bedrooms in the early 2010s, eventually linking up with rapper Jordan Groggs (Stepa J. Groggs) through the kind of serendipitous online connection that defined a generation of artists. Their early mixtapes *Live From the Dentist Office* and *Floss* established them as masters of left-field boom-bap, earning co-signs from everyone from Vince Staples to Aminé. By 2019's *Injury Reserve*, they'd evolved far beyond those humble beginnings.

Where their previous work nodded to golden-age sensibilities while maintaining a contemporary edge, this album sounds like it was beamed in from hip-hop's dystopian future. The production, handled entirely by Parker Corey, is a masterclass in controlled chaos – industrial clangs collide with trap hi-hats, while synthesizers wheeze and gasp like dying machines. It's abrasive in the best possible way, demanding attention rather than settling into the background.

The album's opening salvo, "Outside," immediately establishes the unsettling atmosphere. Groggs' vocals are processed through what sounds like a broken vocoder, delivering paranoid observations over skittering percussion that never quite settles into a groove. It's followed by "SS San Francisco," a disorienting journey through pitch-shifted vocals and distorted guitars that somehow coheres into one of their most compelling tracks. These aren't songs you hum in the shower – they're psychological experiences that burrow into your brain.

"Jawbreaker," featuring Slowthai and Vince Staples, stands as the album's most accessible moment, though "accessible" is relative here. The track builds around a hypnotic loop while the three rappers trade verses about fame's corrosive effects, their voices occasionally dissolving into digital artifacts. It's the closest thing to a conventional rap song on an album that seems allergic to convention.

The record's emotional core lies in tracks like "What a Year It's Been" and "Grayscale," where Groggs reflects on mental health struggles and the isolating effects of success with startling vulnerability. His delivery throughout the album is more subdued than on previous releases, less concerned with technical virtuosity than raw emotional honesty. Ritchie With a T, meanwhile, adapts his flow to match the production's angular rhythms, often sounding like he's fighting his way through the mix.

Perhaps the album's greatest achievement is how it maintains coherence despite its experimental nature. This isn't avant-garde posturing for its own sake – every jarring transition and unsettling sound serves the overarching theme of disconnection and anxiety. In an era when hip-hop had largely settled into predictable formulas, Injury Reserve created something genuinely challenging.

The album's reception was polarizing, as genuinely innovative art often is. Hip-hop purists dismissed it as noise, while critics praised its boundary-pushing approach. Streaming numbers were modest compared to their previous releases, but the album found its audience among listeners hungry for something different. Young artists like JPEGMAFIA and Death Grips had proven there was space for experimental hip-hop, and Injury Reserve carved out their own corner of that territory.

Today, *Injury Reserve* stands as both a creative peak and a heartbreaking farewell. The surviving members have continued as a duo, releasing 2022's *By the Time I Get to Phoenix*, a grief-stricken meditation on loss that serves as a companion piece to this album's themes of alienation. But this self-titled effort remains their most cohesive statement – a document of three artists pushing themselves and their genre into uncharted territory.

It's an album that reveals new layers with each listen, rewarding patience while never fully surrendering its mysteries. In