By Brooke Ortiz
Photos by Navya Duggirala
I catch RiTchie at The Echo on the last stop of his Triple Digits [112] tour on a Tuesday evening. On the other side of the same block, twentysomethings in dark jackets file into the subterranean sister venue Echoplex for Fleshwater, another Nth-wave shoegaze or post-hardcore band riding Pitchfork buzz. Stepping into the relatively intimate capacity of The Echo proper to see RiTchie, formerly of Injury Reserve and currently of By Storm, I’m amused to find myself suddenly in so profoundly different a demographic.
Am I in middle school again? I look around at all the high school kids and in short order identify a Frank tee, a Tyler tee, Earl tee, Panchiko, Lyrical Lemonade…skate shoe to headcount ratio exceeding 1. It’s not often I find a crowd that makes me feel like the senior contingent of the crowd, while simultaneously like I’m once again the middle schooler who idolized Death Grips and Brockhampton more than any politician, parent, or saint.
With about a hundred fans in the crowd of the storied indie venue, the crowd size is of insufficient density to really go crazy, so to speak, since everyone knows that ‘jumping’ is a move that only enters the toolkit of the contemporary youth concertgoer once making simultaneous involuntary contact with at least four strangers’ shoulders.
RiTchie’s laid-back stage presence relies largely on acknowledging the kind of rapper he is, and the type of fans he has: RiTchie teases his “introverted” fans from “r/HipHopHeads” as he brings his playful and charismatic energy to the cozy cult venue for his first L.A. solo performance on the tour of his debut album, daring his fans to get active.
A clique of high school aged kids showing conspicuous enthusiasm are shifted, nay, sifted to the front of the crowd, and RiTchie spends his performance serenading them individually.
I have a history with Nathaniel Ritchie “With a T” that has spanned my whole adolescence: I was a RateYourMusic dweeb at fourteen who found RiTchie’s experimental hip-hop group Injury Reserve (consisting of himself, Parkey Corey, Stepa J. Groggs) from the most likely YouTube music reviewer, name here omitted. I’ve been a diehard for IR’s fresh, jazzy approach to hip-hop since their 2016 sophomore record Floss. Their music largely soundtracked my teenage years.
I have a legacy of Injury Reserve show near-misses. In 2018, I went to a show of theirs in Santa Ana’s Constellation Room with opener JPEGMAFIA that was inexplicably canceled the hour of, and when the trio walked past me on the sidewalk outside the venue lugging speakers, I was quietly starstruck.
Fresh off his release of Veteran, JPEGMAFIA had hung out on the curb fraternizing with his disappointed fans, passing around his vape amiably. There was a rescheduled makeup show I was also forced to miss, and more shows since which I was unable to attend for various reasons of scheduling.
In 2020 the passing of Groggs, the other lyricist of Injury Reserve, was the first celebrity death I remember really rocking me. The two surviving members RiTchie and Parker took a beat from the public eye to mourn their friend privately, and came out the next year in 2021 with IJ’s final record, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, a murky and grieving masterpiece that still sits with me as one of the finest records released this decade.
With the release of By The Time…, the Injury Reserve outfit was retired as the surviving members reformed as By Storm, releasing their promising first single last year.
Now, RiTchie’s debut album Triple Digits [112] has excitedly established him as a one man act with an exciting new album that promises a continuation of an already impressive musical legacy. When RiTchie hops on stage and thanks his fans for being here, and that this tour is his first time performing solo, the fans know how meaningful that really is to him.
Throughout his first headliner tour, RiTchie brings the New Jersey rapper Papo2oo4 with producer-collaborator Subjxct 5 as openers. Papo has been on my radar since his 2022 collaborative record Continuous Improvement, a collaborative album with the nasally, off-kilter Western Massachusetts art rap maestro, the Dark World Records CEO, DJ Lucas.
Subjxct 5 mans the record table and grabs a mic of his own Papo2oo4 comes on stage in a raucous mood when he greets the still-filing-in crowd. The east coaster seems giddy to be in Los Angeles, both praising our city and brutally negging us for our overabundance of tacos and under-abundance of any other kind of food. He jokingly voices his concern for his own personal safety, reminding that our city had killed Nipsey Hussle.
For all of his onstage bravado and antics, the opening duo delivered an impressive performance. Backing vocal tracks are completely absent, only the two emcees’ impressive diction and delivery on the mic.
With evident care for both craft and performance, the duo bring backpack-y rap into our decade with fresh flow and often very boundary-pushing beat selection: breakbeat samples and dancey 808 bass quarter notes make their way into sonic arrangements that don’t seem to expect them.
“Your favorite politician worse than MJ,” Papo declares at one point in his set, non sequitur.
In his performance, RiTchie performs most if not all of the songs on Triple Digits [112]. His personal streaming discography is only a fraction of his career in music, but it’s clear how much fun he’s finding in focusing on performing his own solo work.
The title Triple Digits [112] is a tribute to the sweltering summers of RiTchie’s hometown, and particularly to the high heats during which he recorded this very EP. You can hear the warm climate in the warbled, psychedelic samples and pitched vocals on the blaring opening song WYTD?!?! whose blaring, krautrock guitar samples well-warrant the dual interrobangs. In song, RiTchie asks rhetorically what the plan is, intent on having a good time in spite of the oppressive climate.
For features on [122], RiTchie enlists the help of alt-rap darlings Quelle Chris and Niontay, as well as long-time collaborator Aminé.
Aminé features on the leading single Dizzy, an elaborate and scathing diss on some unnamed poser over a church organ that drives the beat and imbues the upbeat character attack with the joyous righteousness of gospel. It’s a good time, after all.
Graciously offering us the tonal flipside, RiTchie delivers his unique and off-beat take on self-reflective tones when he reaches the bitcrushed ballad Get A Fade, a quaintly impassioned song about haircuts.
When he gets to the impassioned single Looping, I notice how much emotion he puts into his singing. “And you don’t know where to go, you don’t know where to go…” he sings with wrought passion you can read on his face, seeming almost on the verge of tears.
The music of the Injury Reserve trio of RiTchie, Groggs, and Parker was a staple of my music diet in my early teens, and in that way foundational to my taste in music. An artist I grew up on, it was nice to be able to catch up with RiTchie in this way now. It looks like we’re both doing pretty good for ourselves.
