Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson are back on a stage together for the first time since Rush’s 2015 R40 farewell run, and the tour both men once said would never happen keeps adding stops. As of early August 2026, the “Fifty Something” tour has North American dates booked into mid-December, according to Rush’s own tour update page.

Key Points

• The tour runs June 7 through December 15, 2026, with organizers continuing to layer on new North American dates, per rush.com.
• German drummer Anika Nilles has taken the kit, filling the seat left empty since Neil Peart’s 2020 death, reports Forbes.
• Nilles, jazz-trained and classically schooled, was recommended to the band by Geddy Lee’s longtime bass technician, who had worked alongside her on tour with Jeff Beck, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
• Each stop draws from a roughly 35-song, two-set catalog, so setlists shift city to city rather than repeating, according to rush.com.
• Multiple runs have sold out completely, including four-night stands at Los Angeles’s Kia Forum, Fort Worth’s Dickies Arena, Chicago’s United Center, New York’s Madison Square Garden, and Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, per Forbes and the Chicago Sun-Times.
• The band has already booked South American and European dates for early 2027, according to rush.com’s own tour schedule, so the run extends well past its original North American footprint.

The eleven-year gap is not a marketing exaggeration. Lee and Lifeson spent years insisting Rush’s story ended with Peart, and only reconsidered after taking part in tribute concerts following the 2022 death of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, according to the Sun-Times, which also reports that Peart’s family gave the new lineup its blessing before Nilles ever sat behind the kit.

At Madison Square Garden on August 1, that history translated into a nearly three-hour show split across two full sets plus an encore, with the band, in Forbes’ assessment, “magnificently played with urgency and jaw-dropping musicianship” to a sold-out crowd, per Forbes. Chicago’s United Center run four nights earlier ran a similar marathon, twenty-two songs across two sets plus a two-song encore, according to the Sun-Times.

Rush itself has framed the response as a surprise. “We are blown away from the response to the announcement we made a few weeks ago that we’re going back on tour…the way you guys have welcomed Anika Nilles. It’s been very heartwarming,” the band said in an update posted directly to rush.com.

If you caught Rush’s 2015 farewell run and figured that was the last you’d see of them, the calendar says otherwise. A schedule that now stretches from a June 2026 kickoff into a 2027 European run isn’t a victory lap. It’s an active, still-expanding tour that keeps finding new cities to play, more than a decade after the band first said goodbye.