RiTchie softly pauses me mid-sentence, head slung low as he peers at his phone. He’s fact-checking a passing comment I made about Ish Wainwright, the Phoenix Suns forward who I thought went to college in Arizona. The rapper, best known for his work in Injury Reserve and By Storm, hums and shakes his head.

“Mmm, no. Wainwright’s not from here, he’s from Missouri. That would’ve been cool, though,” he says, turning his focus back to asking about the Lakers’ playoff hopes.

There’s an abrasive way to correct the ledger but, when RiTchie does it, he approaches it kindly, as if we’re on a shared fact-finding mission. It’s a small moment in a long conversation, but it typifies what RiTchie exhibits on his debut album, Triple Digits [112]—thoughtful and fun, but meticulous when it comes to the finer points.

When the world met RiTchie, on Injury Reserve’s 2015 mixtape Live at the Dentist’s Office, he was finding his voice alongside the bombastic Stepa J. Groggs. The pair rapped over cloudy jazz reminiscent of the Native Tongues movement, produced by RiTchie’s high school friend Parker Corey. Over their next five projects, Injury Reserve drove deeper into experimental territory. By 2021’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix, the trio reached their triumphant final form, less of a rap group and more a noise band fronted by two rappers. 

Phoenix would be the final Injury Reserve album. During its recording, Groggs passed away and, in 2023, RiTchie and Corey announced they’d continue on under the name By Storm. While RiTchie confirmed that By Storm is working on music, it’s clear in conversation and on the record that Triple Digits is a very different beast. 

“I’ve been trying to deconstruct the art of the rap song,” RiTchie says of his career to date. “Maybe I’ve been a bit pretentious.” 

Pretentious, avant garde, call it what you want. Triple Digits commits in the opposite direction towards a sound RiTchie loosely defines as “day-to-day fun”. The album explores a suite of styles over its 14 tracks. On ‘The Keepers’, RiTchie raps in a low timbre and floats over wispy 808s while ‘WYTD?!?!’ sees him jawing like a pro wrestler strutting down the ramp. On ‘The Things’, he’s bursting to keep pace with esteemed Michigan lyricist Quelle Chris. One track prior, RiTchie sings through a fuzz on a tender reimagining of Radiator Hospital’s ‘Cut Your Bangs’, inspired by Girlpool’s cover of the song.

But the best introduction to Triple Digits is its lead single, ‘Ritchie Valens’, in which RiTchie flexes and shadow-boxes against a backdrop of metallic voices wailing his name. 

“It’s very simple, it’s fun, it’s straightforward and it really puts me in the forefront in a tongue-in-cheek egotistical way,” he says. “What made me green light this record and be like ‘okay, this is worth doing’ is that it doesn’t sound like By Storm and Injury Reserve, or that direction that we’re going in.” 

Across the album, voices persistently tell RiTchie they’re worried about him. It’s understandable given the past few years. But Triple Digits is an implicit nod to allay those fears. The album has an infectious sense of looseness, like RiTchie’s tossed a lot at the wall and left us to marvel at all that sticks.

It’s a polished first effort, using every morsel of wisdom extracted from over a decade of Injury Reserve and By Storm. RiTchie acknowledges as much on ‘Ritchie Valens’—“This shit is just a breeze because I’ve been here for a minute”—and is quick in conversation to laud his bandmates.

“I’m going to speak in reference to the group stuff a lot because it’s such a big impact on how I do this,” he says. “I’ve learned so much within the past decade of doing this. I knew, if I would ever do this, exactly what I wanted to do.” 

Sure enough, listening to Triple Digits is like watching someone replay a video game they’ve already beaten. Every decision from the lead single selection, a “palette cleanser” to reset expectations, to opening Side B of the vinyl with the hilarious battle rap interlude ‘Your Worst Nightmare’, has been mapped out and considered.

RiTchie is effusive in talking about his bandmates and the learnings gleaned from working with them. He speaks at length about Groggs, championing his friend’s knack for the “craft of writing raps”.

“Over time, it’s something that has haunted me more and more and more, because my least favourite part of the process is the articulation stage. For him, that was the one thing you knew he was consistently going to do,” he says. 

“That was something that I challenged myself to do on this record, I’m trying to bring in that craft of doing the traditional rap verse because there’s really nothing more special than it. A really good verse is better than anything.”

“I knew I was going to have to face my fears in that regard, or face what I thought I outgrew, because I knew that I didn’t. It makes me a better artist. It makes me a more well-rounded artist.” 

RiTchie illustrates his case by referencing Injury Reserve’s 2021 collaboration with Code Orange and JPEGMAFIA, a track called ‘HPNGC’.

“The whole song, I’m building this world and [Groggs] comes in with this very traditional straightforward rap verse and it’s all anybody ever talks about. But my whole thing is, ‘well, you can’t get there without this.’ So, now I’m trying to just learn that craft and remaster and re-appreciate that craft of the traditional rap verse. I really challenged myself with that.”

After listening to RiTchie on Parker Corey’s beats for so long, it’s jarring to hear new producers in the mix. Rather than chasing splashy big names to throw on the credits, RiTchie looked inwards towards old friends, such as Corey and Injury Reserve collaborator melik, and a curation of “hungry” up-and-comers such as J. Fisher, AJRadico and FearDorian. 

RiTchie goes out of his way to hype FearDorian, a 17-year-old from Atlanta, introduced to him through rapper Tony Velour. The high schooler produced two songs on the album—‘How’ and ‘The Keepers’—which RiTchie feels pushed him into territory he hadn’t “had the guts to work on” before.

“Even though ‘How’ is a better song, I feel like ‘The Keepers’ is a really cool mixture of styles that I could see being a potential sound of mine in the future … just finding this landscape that’s a bit more like everyday life music in contrast to maybe where the group has developed.” 

The allusion to ‘everyday life music’ and its comparison to Injury Reserve/By Storm is a tactful and nuanced way of addressing a topic that could easily be turned into clickbait. In the group, RiTchie’s making music atop a jenga tower—building atop of baked in expectations of what it’s supposed to sound like, operating in the long shadow of Groggs’ legacy. As a solo artist taking his first steps, RiTchie is starting anew, laying the foundations from scratch.

Triple Digits feels like the first lick of fresh air after stepping out of a nightclub. RiTchie tells me the project “started out kind of like a therapy session” and it has the energy of someone letting off steam. 

It also feels communal and warm. Many songs are bookended by slice-of-life soundbytes—ambient barbershop noise, fragments of conversation and a hilarious voice note from melik, friend and collaborator.

“We’re big fans of battle rap so it’s just him sending me a voice message of him doing some type of battle rap segment. He just sends me shit like that all the time, because he’s insane and I was like, ‘this is incredible. I need to put this on the record’ and it worked out perfectly as a fun interlude.”

Instead of shedding any links to his other life in Injury Reserve and By Storm, RiTchie leans into it. Even when he’s setting himself the challenge of standing on his own, RiTchie never feels truly alone. Triple Digits is a statement of intent from one of rap’s most down-to-earth artists, delivering one of the most assured debut records of the year.

Follow RiTchie here for more and stream the debut album Triple Digits [112] here.