How Anika Nilles Became Rush's New Drummer

In a November 2023 Guardian interview, Rush's Geddy Lee noted that we were living "in a time rich for great drummers." He name-checked Tool's Danny Carey and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Then he mentioned a far less familiar player: "I heard this drummer the other day, I think her name is Anika [Nilles]. She played on the last Jeff Beck tour and I thought was she was terrific."

Whether Lee knew it or not a that time, it turns out Nilles is the person who would help him and guitarist Alex Lifeson feel confident enough to reunite for the first Rush tour since Neil Peart's 2020 death.

Rush's touring career seemed to have reached its end after the final date of their career-spanning R40 tour, which took place Aug. 1, 2015 in Los Angeles. Soon after, Peart announced his retirement from the road.

"He was struggling throughout that tour to play at his peak, because of physical ailments and other things that were going on with him," Lee told Eddie Trunk in 2018. "He’s a perfectionist, and he didn’t want to go out and do anything less than what people expected of him. That's what drove him his whole career, and that's the way he wanted to go out, and I totally respect that."

After a difficult and private three-and-a-half-year battle with cancer, Peart died in January 2020. Six months later, Lifeson said the loss had left him without the inspiration or motivation to even play his instrument.

"Every time I pick up a guitar, I just aimlessly kind of mess around with it and put it down after 10 minutes," he told WFAN. "Normally, I would pick up a guitar and I would play for a couple of hours without even being aware that I'm spending that much time."

Although Lee and Lifeson immediately began receiving a slew of "inappropriate" messages from drummers hoping to join the group, they needed time to process their grief first. "Dude, wait two months. At least two months, if ever," Lee later explained.

Five years after Peart's death - and with some helpful nudging from none other than Paul McCartney - the time has arrived. "Alex and I have done some serious soul searching and come to the decision that we fucking miss it," Lee said in an October 2025 press release announcing their 2026 tour. "It’s time for a celebration of 50-something years of Rush music."

It helped that a member of the band's inner circle had located the right drummer. "My bass tech, Skully was working with Jeff Beck and he was on tour," Lee revealed during an Oct. 5 press event at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "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...

"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, so 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."

Born into a family with multiple drummers in Aschaffenburg, Germany on May 29, 1983 - that's roughly halfway between the release dates for 1982's Signals and 1984's Grace Under Pressure - Nilles began playing herself at age six.

Around 2010, she left a steady career in social education to pursue her dreams of a musical career. "It was really risky," she told Modern Drummer in 2017. "I always knew that I wasn't happy at that job, but when you get money and you are safe, it's not easy to quit."

After spending the next few years brushing up on her skills, making ends meet with music lessons and gigs, Nilles recorded a video of her original song "Wild Boy," which instantly went viral and helped her become a star on the international drum festival and clinic circuit. Her next release, "Alter Ego," reached an even wider audience.

Watch Anika Nilles Perform 'Wild Boy'

"For me, music is all about emotion," Nilles told the site 15 Questions. "On drums, that emotion comes through in dynamics—playing with sound and silence just as much as with notes. And of course, it’s also about the player’s touch. When all those elements come together, that’s when I really feel the beauty of music."

As her fame continued to grow, Nilles released her first solo album Pikalar in 2017, won a shelf full awards from various drum magazines and performed with Jeff Beck on his 2022 European tour, which (as mentioned above) is what brought her to the attention of Rush's inner circle.

Of course, the prospect of replacing Peart is a particularly challenging one, both for Nilles and for Lee and Lifeson.

"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," Lee explained at the October Hall of Fame event. "So whoever we were going to choose was going to be difficult, and there was going to be like a translation. And so we very secretly brought Anika to Canada, and we did it wasn't an audition, because at that point we weren't really sure that we were going to tour. It was all an experiment."

Luckily, this experiment proved highly successful. "I'm very happy to say that she is fantastic to play with and we've had now a number of sessions with her and we're going to go on the road with her," Lee declared.

"I think she's a remarkable story. And you know, she's much younger than us," the 72-year-old bassist and singer pointed out. "I know it's hard to believe, and I like that, that she came to Rush music without any preconceptions. It also made it very difficult, because we had to explain nuances and work on subtleties and she had to really try to get into Neil's headspace and his feel. You know, you can play a drum fill. A lot of drummers can play Neil's drum fills, but to combine that with the feel of those songs so that it feels the way you guys want to hear those songs. That's work, that requires work. So she's winning."

Watch Anika Nilles Perform 'Shine'