Review: By Storm at The Rechabite

By Storm at The Rechabite
w/ Effective Power
Friday, August 21, 2026

For fans of alternative hip-hop, Friday night at The Rechabite played modest host to a must-see performance. The duo calling themselves By Storm are rapper Nathaniel Ritchie and producer Parker Corey, and their release Ghosts Go Ghost will go down as one of this genre’s best for the year. The talent on display doesn’t surprise given they are two-thirds of Injury Reserve, one of the 2010s’ most promising hip-hop outfits and a group cut short when member Stepa J. Groggs passed away in 2020. After the bruising melancholy and dissonance of the posthumously released By the Time I Get to Pheonix in 2021, Injury Reserve gave way to By Storm (the group itself named after that album’s final track).

Despite the group’s sometimes abrasive production work, their recent lyricism has skewed towards vulnerability, and this came through on the night more than anything else. Opening the evening was a pared-back DJ set of smooth hip-hop and sample-based electronica, which set the tone for something darker while wisely not setting anything alight.

By Storm were on before the crowd knew it, stepping on stage to a fitting backdrop of white light and static noise before making their presence felt with the haunting Can I Have You For Myself which covers a key album theme of anxiety towards change, even if framed in a positive light, as it’s set to Ritchie’s shift into parenthood. Dead Weight uses Ritchie’s dreadlocks as a metaphor for carrying emotional demons and the push/pull of wanting to cut them away, and he exemplified this on stage with a pained performance. Throughout, his work on the mic was fitting of By Storm’s heart-on-sleeve lyricism, as he showcased a sort of raw vulnerability that can be rare in hip-hop. Grapefruit navigated to more familiar genre territory as it covered the paranoia of fame, with the track’s creepy dread captured live in all its glory.

In My Town is one of the group’s most haunting tracks, and it was interesting to see Perth get a mention here. It covers another of the album’s recurring themes of transformation and isolation, charting a performer’s greater exposure as the grind starts to pay off, yet the isolation of the road is unending. We can only hope that our far-flung shores were not stoking that fire, and yet if this tour inspires songs as good as this one, then we may begrudgingly have to nod and smile.

Zig Zag was the other big new track of note, a stone-cold classic about avoidance of life’s difficulties and the challenge of getting things on track after Injury Reserve’s demise. It was only fitting then that this segued into several of that group’s tracks, in what was a fitting reminder of the group’s history and the memory of Stepa J. The three-punch combo of Superman That, Knees and Bye Storm was an emotional tour de force as Ritchie left his heart to bleed on the stage as on the refrain of “ain’t no saving me” on Superman.

Bye Storm pared against Ghosts Go Ghost closer GGG to finish the night was a master stroke, as By Storm left us on a mournful note. “It rains, it pours, but damn it’s really pouring,” Ritchie refrained on the former, a keystone track highlighting the group’s struggles at the time and perhaps to this day. GGG could be considered its sequel, with the initial storm clearing but melancholy taking its place for something that is forever lost too soon—“don’t let me go”.

MATIJA ZIVKOVIC

Photos by Linda Dunjey