RUSH
Rush is a Canadian progressive rock band formed in Toronto in August 1968, originally with guitarist Alex Lifeson, drummer John Rutsey and bassist Jeff Jones; Geddy Lee replaced Jones within weeks, and Neil Peart replaced Rutsey in July 1974, fixing a lineup that held for the next four decades. Peart took on most of the lyric writing, drawing on science fiction, literature and philosophy, while the band moved from blues-based hard rock through the long-form progressive rock of the mid-to-late 1970s, a synthesizer-driven 1980s, and a return to guitar-centered rock from the 1990s onward. The trio's sound rested on Lee's high tenor and his habit of covering bass and synthesizer parts at once, Lifeson's layered guitar and Peart's polyrhythmic drumming. The catalog runs from the side-long title suite of 2112 (1976) through A Farewell to Kings (1977), Hemispheres (1978), the tighter Permanent Waves (1980), the arena-scaled Moving Pictures (1981) and the keyboard-forward Signals (1982), to the final studio album, Clockwork Angels (2012). The band has sold roughly 26 million albums in the United States and an estimated 42 million worldwide, holding 14 platinum and three multi-platinum US certifications, and was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. They stopped touring after the R40 run in 2015, and Peart's death from glioblastoma in January 2020 appeared to close the story. In October 2025 Lee and Lifeson announced otherwise: the Fifty Something tour, running through 2026 and 2027, with German drummer Anika Nilles behind the kit and Loren Gold on keyboards, making Rush a quartet on stage for the first time. The tour was expanded to additional cities after the initial on-sale, and includes an arena run through North America.