Anika Nilles releases statement about joining Rush for their tour

Earlier this week, Rush announced plans for a 2026 reunion tour, as UCR reports. As you can imagine, the idea of being chosen to perform the roles that the late Neil Peart once performed is intimidating. However, drummer Anika Nilles expressed her thanks for the opportunity in a recent social media post. She revealed her first appropriate response since the tour announcement on Monday.

Hey there,
the past few days have been quite overwhelming. I’m sure many of you feel the same. I want to take a moment to sincerely thank Geddy and Alex for their trust and for welcoming me on this incredible new journey with @rush . I also don’t want to miss the chance to warmly welcome all the new faces here and to thank you for your kind and open-minded words – they truly mean a lot. At the same time, I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has followed and supported my journey over the years. We’re all in this together now, and I couldn’t be more excited about what lies ahead.

xx anika

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by • A N i K A ~ N i L L E S • (@anika.nilles)

“We are living “in a time rich for great drummers,” Geddy said in a 2023 interview with The Guardian, citing Tool‘s Danny Carey and Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ Chad Smith as two examples. He then talked about Anika Nilles, a more recent talent who had caught his attention. Jeff Beck had been performing with the drummer, who has also had a successful solo career. “I thought she was terrific,” he continued.

Thanks to his longstanding bass tech, John “Skully” McIntosh, Lee would unpredictably connect with Nilles as he and Lifeson resumed playing Rush songs in private.

He was on tour with [Beck] for a few years, and on the last tour he was playing with this drummer named Anika Nilles — an incredible drummer. And he would come home, he would rave about her, what a brilliant player she was and great person, and blah, blah, blah. So I kind of looked her up. And she’s all over YouTube. She’s fairly well known in her own world of music. And then we started talking about playing again. I said to Al, I said, ‘Check her out. Maybe that’s an interesting way to go.’ And so one thing led to another, and when we made the decision we wanted to see if it would work, what’s it like to play with another drummer — we’d had that experience, of course, at the Taylor Hawkins tributes [in September 2022]. So we know how difficult it is — no matter who the drummer is, they all have their own perception of what it’s like to play a Rush song, and they may not line up with the way we play Rush songs. So whoever we were going to choose was going to be difficult and there’s going to be like a translation.