After a tumultuous year, By The Time I Get To Phoenix sees Injury Reserve delving further down the experimental rabbit hole, continuing to craft truly unique hip-hop because, according to Parker Corey and Ritchie with a T,  they’re “just having fun”. They spoke to Chris Twite on Arvos about the post-pandemic DIY landscape, the organic origins of collaborations and their latest ‘By The Time I Get to Phoenix.’

Parker: We’re aware how weird it is, if people don’t like it, I feel a little bad for them but I understand…

Parker and Ritchie spoke about the process of this new record: notably the lack of vocal features compared to 2019’s ‘Injury Reserve’.

Ritchie: Everything that we wanted to do was just gonna be organically, super internal, we didn’t want to be waiting for anything or trying to figure out slots and “who are we gonna put on this song?”

In that same vein, they talked about their unlikely relationships with groups like Black Country, New Road and their collaboration with Jockstrap, ‘Robert’.

R: We became good friends with them and we loved that song… they often were having that conversation on who they wanted to put on that song… eventually deciding to put Groggs on the song was really cool because we had kinda felt like we were already a part of that process.

As the world begins to look down the barrel of “post-pandemic”, Injury Reserve wonders what might be missing, and what might reappear in the DIY scenes that they found their start in.

R: What you hope happens is that the real, genuine DIY shit is what really starts picking up… things that are happening in even more untraditional spaces… it’s an area that they don’t normally throw shows, and people are like “Yo, we’re gonna pull up, plug in the PA and play.”

P: There’s been some cultural changes where perhaps things like that might’ve been seen more generally as transgressive things, things that people do as a snub to bigger things, I think some of the political implications of DIY communities and that practice and doing art in general has become more evident, culturally, since the pandemic.

Parker and Ritchie also guest programmed a few of their favourite new tracks from Ka, L’Rain and Tony Yayo towards the end of the show.

R (on Ka’s ‘I Notice’): This is what wisdom feels like to me… You felt the wisdom and the experience through the songwriting and I just immediately gravitated towards it.

Listen back to Injury Reserve’s full chat with Chris Twite up top.

Tune in to Arvos with Chris Twite every Tuesday from 3pm!