Album Review: My Ghosts Go Ghost by By Storm
By Storm’s debut is a raw account of grief, fatherhood, and financial precarity. The writing stays honest about its greed in ways most rap refuses.
Possessiveness doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it sounds like a man asking his pregnant partner for one more quiet moment, knowing he’s about to lose monopoly over her attention. The want surfaces early here, and nothing on the record pretends that want is clean. A voice begs for a few more milliseconds of “just us two” before the math changes to three. RiTchie knows he’s making the arrival of his child about himself and admits it openly, then keeps asking anyway.
That particular honesty carries the album further than its noisier gestures. On “Dead Weight,” RiTchie refuses to cut his locs even as others tell him he’d move lighter without them. People insist cutting the hair would mean freedom, a clean slate, brighter days. All of it gets shut down. “I feel broken I feel sliding feel misguided I feel pain.” The locs are inheritance, grief, a physical link to someone lost, and cutting them off would mean letting go of a memory embedded in the weight. “If I shed it, they forget him” comes from a person terrified of what vanishes when evidence does.
Stepa J. Groggs died in 2020. RiTchie and producer Parker Corey spent years circling the question of how to continue without renaming what they were doing entirely. They retired the Injury Reserve name and moved forward as By Storm in 2023. That context sharpens every refusal here. “Dead Weight” makes more sense once you understand the hair isn’t symbolic. It’s a tether to a bandmate who wore his locs the same way.
Survival math shows up plainest on “In My Town,” which toggles between Shell gift cards and delivery apps and the tank light blinking at the wrong moment. RiTchie raps about writing songs in his car between DoorDash runs while his wife approaches eight months pregnant, and there’s no triumph in that hustle narrative. The envelopes handed out at college shows and the small-town gigs offer just enough cash to keep the baby room in view, but the arithmetic never quite closes. The line about driving home “your favorite rapper at your door now” reads like embarrassment dressed up in irony. Those gift cards return throughout because they represent something more honest than streaming numbers ever could, the question of whether or not there’s gas money tomorrow.
“Grapefruit” makes exposure bodily. RiTchie rips himself open and barely gets a blink in return. The album’s most anxious moment, it logs the gap between what the speaker thinks he’s giving and what anyone else seems to receive. Y2K aesthetics and allegations get mentioned in the same breath, not because the subjects belong together but because the internet flattens everything into content, and by the final chorus the inside looks “something like grapefruit,” visible and pulpy and apparently unremarkable to whoever’s watching.
The billy woods feature on “Best Interest” arrives like a cold draft through an open window. RiTchie’s verses stick to survival rules that sour into paranoia, all tinted windows and minding your business and trusting nobody with your digits. Then woods enters and turns “who wants to know” into something closer to dread than swagger, sitting alone with ghosts, charcoal pencil sketching bones, asking whether the road ends before you recognize it. That verse changes the whole temperature, and RiTchie’s instructions start to sound less wise than frightened.
Where do ghosts go when they stop haunting? “GGG” poses that question and can’t answer it. RiTchie tests handles, sweeps basements, lights candles, rearranges furniture, and still feels nothing. His ghosts went ghost, which means they aren’t gone so much as relocated to somewhere he can’t follow. “Don’t let me go” loops like a prayer addressed to no one in particular, and the movement from dodging shadows to trying to cast more of them is a strange image until you consider that grief sometimes makes people chase the very weight they once fled.
The desire for witnesses outweighs the desire for healing on “Double Trio 2.” “But I want niggas to know” comes back again and again even as the lyrics talk themselves into starting fresh, and that contradiction never resolves because the song isn’t really interested in resolving it. Being seen in the aftermath matters as much as moving past it, and the track doesn’t pretend otherwise.
By the time “And I Dance” arrives, the ash is still caught in his hair and there’s been no cleanup. The sky looks auburn, the embers glow, and the only instruction is to keep moving. Catharsis isn’t promised and might not even be the point. The party happens whether or not you’ve sorted through the wreckage, and the song accepts that without trying to turn acceptance into victory.
Behavior stays at the center throughout. Fear, greed, grief, financial desperation. Parker Corey’s production matches that focus with unstable rhythms and cavernous space, but the language carries the album because the best lines here stick by describing actions instead of announcing feelings.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite(s): Dead Weight, In My Town, Best Interest, GGG
 | A guest post by
|