On Monday, Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced their plans to hit the road for a tour in 2026. The bandmates revealed that they had selected drummer Anika Nilles to replace Neil Peart, who died in 2020.
Nilles will join the group for the 12 stops on the tour, including two shows in Toronto at Scotiabank Arena on Aug. 7 and Aug. 9.
Here is everything you need to know about the German-born drummer.
She played with Jeff Beck
Nilles toured with English rocker Jeff Beck in 2022.
“She played on the last Jeff Beck tour, and I thought she was terrific,” Lee told The Guardian in 2023 about Nilles.
WATCH | Anika Nilles performs live with Jeff Beck:
Rush announced their tour at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland on Oct. 5 and Lee mentioned how Nilles being in Beck’s band put her on his radar.
“My bass tech, Skully was working with Jeff Beck and he was on tour,” said Lee. “Sadly, before Jeff passed away, he was on tour with him 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, blah, blah, blah…”
She has a popular YouTube channel
Other drummers might recognize Nilles from her YouTube channel, where she posts videos of herself drumming.
Lee told the audience at at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame that he looked at Nilles’s channel: “So I kind of looked her up, and she’s all over YouTube. She’s fairly well known in her own world of music,” he said.
WATCH | Anika Nilles performs Alter Ego:
She has more than 246,000 subscribers and several of her videos have millions of views, including Alter Ego, an original composition of hers, which has been watched more than four million times.
She was previously a preschool teacher
Nilles studied social work for five years and became a preschool teacher. She told the Beat, “It was fun, it gave me the chance to be creative, and I got a really good job offer after my final exam. But I had to think carefully about my situation.”
She eventually quit to chase a career in music, and told Modern Drummer, “I always knew that I wasn’t that happy at that job.”
She has released 4 albums
In addition to her most recent album, False Truth, which she released last year, Nilles has put out Pikalar (2017), For a Colorful Soul (2020) and Opuntia (2022).
