Big Little Drummer Girl.
Rush. Rush hour? No — Rush is one of Canada's most celebrated rock bands. The drummer Neil Peart is widely regarded as one of the greatest drummers of all time.
And the singer and bassist is Geddy Lee, a man from Newmarket, Ontario, Canada.
Hear the name Rush, and Neil Peart comes to mind at once.
Neil was Rush’s drummer and lyricist from 1974 until the band’s end — and for many simply the finest rock drummer of his generation. Three things made him one of the most extraordinary drummers there has ever been. Neil was less a player than an architect, building technical structures into every song. Peart didn’t treat the drum kit as a rhythmic foundation but as a compositional instrument. His parts were fully composed — every tom figure, every bell stroke, every odd time signature — 7/8, 13/8, constant shifts — had its place. “Tom Sawyer,” “YYZ,” and “La Villa Strangiato” are, in essence, drum scores. The enormous kit with its tubular bells, temple blocks, glockenspiel, and later electronic pads was no showoff arrangement but a sound palette — he thought melodically, in tonal colours.
The perfectionist who was never finished.
Neil Peart wrote nearly all of Rush’s lyrics — philosophical, literary, ranging from science fiction to individualism to deeply personal pieces written after the deaths of his daughter and his first wife in the late nineties. A drummer who was simultaneously the intellectual heart of the band: a rare combination. He died in January 2020 at sixty-seven, of a brain tumour.
And now: Anika Nilles, Germany’s drumming talent.
The comparison has become timely: Rush opened their “Fifty Something” reunion tour on June 7th, 2026, at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles — the first complete concert in nearly eleven years, and the first with Nilles behind the kit. But first, an important note: Anika Nilles is no Peart copy. She is a singular force in her own right. The German drummer and composer launched her career in the early 2010s on YouTube and has released two albums with her band Nevell. Her music is fusion-rooted — complex polyrhythms, linear drumming, ghost notes. Technically, she plays in a league where the comparison with Peart becomes meaningful at all. Geddy Lee had come to know her from Jeff Beck’s final tour in 2022 and was already calling her “terrific” in 2023.
Anika Nilles comes from a groove- and fusion-oriented world. Her first real excursion into rock and pop was simply Toto. In one interview, she herself highlighted Peart’s energetic playing and his melodic approach — his vast range of tonal colours — as things she recognises in herself. That is exactly where the kinship lies: both think in tones, not merely in beats.
It was, all the same, an enormously brave step for Anika to take Neil Peart’s place behind the kit in the real test of June 7th, 2026.
Fan recordings of the complete opening concert show that she hits virtually every idiosyncrasy of Peart’s highly individual playing. Fans and critics agreed after the premiere: “She killed it!”
Anika plays with a joy and passion that keeps drawing a wide grin from Geddy Lee.
Peart remains irreplaceable — as a lyricist certainly, and as someone who co-composed the band’s sound across forty years. Anika Nilles doesn’t replace Neil; she interprets him — with her own authority and, clearly, with the respect the task demands.
Anika trusted herself to carry Neil Peart’s legacy forward with care. And she did far more than simply pass the test
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