From his home in Washington, DC, where guitars hang off every visible wall, Anthony Pirog is trying to explain The Messthetics’ polymorphous spree of sound. A humble guitar virtuoso raised on surf music, Sonny Boy Williamson, psychedelia and Sonic Youth, Pirog played blues and jazz in high school, went on to study at Berklee, was seduced by the improvisations of Derek Bailey, John Zorn and Ornette Coleman, had a heavy John Fahey period and later immersed himself in “contemporary classical scores”. By the time former Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty first encountered Pirog in the mid-2010s, the guitarist had fallen firmly under the spell of late ‘Telecaster jazz’ godhead Danny Gatton, who’d “combined rockabilly, jazz, blues, country… basically all popular guitar music up through the 80s”. On any given night you’d find Pirog playing in a surf band, or a jazz gig, or a solo free improv performance.
“I was inspired by the 1970s, when fusion made a big show of combining everything, all genres,” he says. “I had so many interests. But really, I just loved very energetic music. And it was never a plan – I’ve always just been, ‘I love this… and I love this… and I love THIS…’”
The Messthetics are the perfect vehicle for the musicians who travel within it, their lightning-in-a-bottle music rampant, improvisational and on a smash and grab mission to loot and lift from everything within reach. Within their sound, you can hear all those obsessions of Pirog’s – and also those of Canty, and bassist Joe Lally, and new-addition saxophonist James Brandon Lewis – whirling past, congealing and commingling. And while Pirog has been educated at one of the most-respected colleges of music, The Messthetics’ kinetic pell-mell obliterates the academic approach in favour of creating on-the-fly sonic networks between abstract ideas and concepts – and making those connections work.
Connections mean a lot to The Messthetics. They’re founded upon a rhythm section who first played together almost 40 years ago, and whose enduring bond was revived after a 15-year lull by the project. That the connection between Canty and Lally is akin to that between siblings shouldn’t surprise – rhythm sections are intimate relationships, paired musicians interlocking their playing so they operate like a single machine. They’re twin prison escapees, desperately pumping their handcars with the warden on their tail, trying to pull off something miraculous under pressure. You understand why rhythm sections are often reluctant to part ways, to relinquish supernatural connections that took years to develop. These, after all, are the things that really matter.
Lally and Canty first spied each other in 1986, across a Washington, DC punk scene still reeling from the previous year’s Revolution Summer. This transformative happening had set hardcore punk in evolution mode, as a generation of established DC groups dissolved and recombined as new units, swapping the creative dead-end of early-80s hardcore for more compelling, nuanced and experimental sounds. Lally was then rehearsing with Ian MacKaye, former frontman of scene pioneers Minor Threat, woodshedding what would become Fugazi. Canty had come in for one of their rehearsals, after the embryonic Fugazi’s first drummer, Colin Sears, lit off on tour with his day-job, Dag Nasty. That rehearsal electrified all present – but there was a problem. “Brendan sure was great, and we wanted to keep playing with him,” remembers Lally. “But he was in another band.”
Canty was then drumming with Happy Go Licky, and stealing a drummer from an existing group was verboten within the ethics-forward DC scene. So Lally and MacKaye kept trying out other drummers – “and hating it” – until Happy Go Licky split in the spring of 1987 and Canty was free to assume the Fugazi drum-stool full-time. “But even then, we kept wondering, ‘Is Brendan going to stay with us?’” Lally remembers, on a shared Zoom chat with Canty from their respective homes in DC. “We couldn’t extract Guy from the equation. How could Brendan be in a band without Guy?”
Guy Picciotto was Happy Go Licky’s singer/guitarist, former frontman of the epochal DC group Rites Of Spring (who had also featured Canty), and Canty’s best friend. Canty loved the music he was creating with Lally and MacKaye, but he also couldn’t extract Guy from the equation. “I’d always been in bands with Guy. And even when Fugazi started, I was always committed in my head to being in a band with Guy.”
Luckily, Picciotto also dug what Fugazi were doing, and wanted in. A regular visitor to their practices, he was in attendance at the group’s first show at DC’s Wilson Center, on September 3, 1987, singing along from the audience. By their second show, Lally says, Picciotto was side-of-stage, “trying to figure out how he’s going to get into doing backing vocals – he was already adding something. And he took more and more of a role as things went on, until he was singing lead on a few songs.”
As the group took shape, so did their rhythm section, the guts of the Fugazi machine. “I was clueless about how to play my instrument at that time,” Lally says. “But my vision was really clear. I was trying to write riffs that were like giant blocks of stone, that you could build pyramids with. So I tried to write riffs that were almost immoveable. Brendan’s ability to add so many different types of detail brought in the sophistication.”
“Joe created this really sturdy jungle gym for me to play on,” says Canty, “and I could fuck around on top of everything he’s doing. And I wouldn’t be able to do that with every bass player, I’d have to settle down. But with Joe, I could do some level of flailing around, a little Keith Moon, and some jazzy stuff on top of what he’s doing, because he was so solid. We were in pursuit of sonic power, evolving this idea of what our band could do live and on record. We called what we did ‘the bed’, like in the Fugazi song ‘Bed For The Scraping’ – we created this musical bed, so Ian and Guy could make a bunch of noise on top of it..”
It was a job that Lally and Canty executed brilliantly for the next 15 years, as Fugazi became the exemplar of late-20th century punk. Those years saw Fugazi become one of the most consistently great live groups in the world, and establish a discography of challenging, fiercely creative releases – each better than the one that came before. So it was heartbreaking when, in 2003, they announced their indefinite hiatus. And while the decision to cease operations was unanimous, it was also painful for all involved.
As one might expect from a unit that bucked every single rock & roll cliché, Fugazi’s dissolution was not due to that old canard “musical differences”. Instead, insurmountable “real world” stuff called time on the group. “My wife’s father had dropped dead very suddenly at the age of 60,” says Canty. “We had our third child on the way. Everything in my life was super-chaotic, and I needed to spend some time home and make sure everyone was OK. I couldn’t really see a world where leaving to tour for even a few weeks was possible. And the thing about Fugazi was, we really did everything our way, and we prioritised it above everything else. We met three times a week to practice, for four hours at a time, and were constantly writing and touring. We took pride in the way that we did things. But…”
“…but that meant we couldn’t just ‘kind of’ do Fugazi,” adds Lally. “We had to do it our way, all the way, or not at all.”
“Just in service of what we’d built, we were like, ‘We should close the book on this chapter, and then pick it up again when things make more sense’,” Canty says. “So that’s what we did.”
“It was nothing less than devastating,” adds Lally. “I absolutely understood why we were doing it, but it was a tragedy. I can only use harsh words.”
In the aftermath of Fugazi’s split, Canty pursued other projects and diversified into soundtracks for TV shows. Lally worked on a solo album, 2006’s There To Here, and joined John Frusciante and Josh Klinghoffer for their group Ataxia, before relocating to Rome with his wife and child. There, he collaborated with musicians in the city’s punk-jazz scene. “I was trying to understand what music I wanted to make next, but I couldn’t really make sense of it yet.”
He continued to work on this new music after returning to the US in 2015, knowing he wanted to explore them with his old brother-in-rhythm, Canty. Soon, they found themselves in a rehearsal space. Lally says reconnecting with Canty “was like muscle memory. My body was like, ‘Oh, I remember this’ – this sense that this other person is an extension of my own playing. I felt it come from my feet to the top of my head, and I was like, ‘Just fucking bring it on, because there’s nothing that’s going to stop me now’.”
“We’d put the needle back on the record – it felt absolutely the same,” nods Canty. The drummer listened to Lally’s new sketches, and sensed their project could benefit from another voice – a musician he’d come across while pursuing his interest in ‘Telecaster jazz’. “It’s like hillbilly jazz,” Canty chuckles, “country music, but also solidly jazz, this very particular, very ‘DC’ sound. I went to see ‘Telecaster jazz’ musician Dave Chappell play one night in town, and there was this young guy playing with him who blew my mind. And then a couple of nights later I saw that same guy – Anthony Pirog – playing in an ambient guitar/cello duo with his wife, Janel Leppin. And then, later still, I saw him play a solo show, just utter noise. It was fantastic.”
Canty had reached out to Pirog to soundtrack a demolition scene from a show he was working on, Burn To Shine; the session proved revelatory. “Anthony literally can do anything he wants with that guitar, really,” Canty says. “He’s got great taste and great harmonic sensibilities and great tonal sensibilities, and he’s just the loveliest guy on the planet. So when Joe came back from Rome with all this stuff, I was like, ‘This could work’, you know?”
“Joe was looking for a guitarist for a potential tour, and he and Brendan asked me to come play,” remembers Pirog. “The tour ended up not happening, but after a couple of months I built up the courage to ask if I could hire them as my rhythm section for a record. And then Brendan was like, ‘Why don’t we just start a band?’”
The first two Messthetics albums – 2018’s self-titled debut and 2019’s Anthropocosmic Nest – grew from the recording studio located in Canty’s loft, where he and Lally rebuilt that sonic bed that had carried so much of the frenzied invention across Fugazi’s discography. “It was such a strong foundation, I knew I could play anything over the top of it and it would be just fine,” says Pirog. “Like, I could go completely ‘noise’ over this, and since it feels good, it would work. Everything in The Messthetics is so completely wide-open, even things that were challenging to all of us, like playing weird time signatures, becomes second-nature.”
The songs develop from practice space improvisations and, says Pirog, continue evolving in the live performances. “The songs’ forms are the same as jazz form, where it’s just head, solo, head. I’m not playing the same licks every night, and Joe and Brendan aren’t reacting to my playing the same way every night.”
This jazzy impulse blossoms further on the group’s most recent album, 2024’s The Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis, which – as the title makes explicit – sees the group collaborating with the New York saxophonist. Pirog first met Lewis at a session with drummer William Hooker that was later released as Hooker’s 2018 LP Pillars… At The Portal. “It was completely improv – we played for just an hour or so, and that was the record,” Pirog says. “And while I was playing, James was really staring at me intensely. I was like, ‘This guy hates my playing, I feel really uncomfortable. But he sounds sick – what a tone!’ After the session, James came up to me and said, ‘Man, you sound amazing’.”
The duo became regular collaborators – Pirog appears on Lewis’ 2016 set No Filter, and alongside the late Jaimie Branch on 2019’s An Unruly Manifesto – and once The Messthetics gathered pace, Pirog invited Lewis to jam with the band. Soon, every time The Messthetics hit the Big Apple, they’d share their stage with Lewis, and they guested on his 2023 breakthrough, Eye Of I. Last year’s album-length collaboration was a no-brainer, and the alliance has become an ongoing thing, with this quartet version of The Messthetics touring regularly, and preparing for a second album together.
“James is a big player,” says Canty. ‘His tone is insane. Everything he plays just pushes us around, in a beautiful way. He came into the room without a microphone while we were practicing, and I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s a loud fucking instrument!’ It just makes me so happy. And he turns on the bandstand and screams at me to go off and play loud, louder. I’ve been waiting for somebody to tell me to hit my cymbals louder my entire life. This is my guy!”
While the group still play occasionally as a trio, all involved see the Lewis-augmented lineup as the main event. Pirog says having Lewis in the band “opens up the option to not play – I can be part of the rhythm section now, we can harmonise. And, oddly enough, there’s more space now – more opportunities for different textures.” “Now that James is in the band, we have two very distinct, very strong voices that approach every solo differently, the same way Ian and Guy would approach their vocals differently,” says Lally. “In Fugazi, we’d often kick back and dub, build the songs up to support the lyrics and vocals, and that same level of interaction is happening now with the saxophone and guitar.”
Lewis, meanwhile, is thrilled to be a part of the gang. Snatching moments between soundcheck and a performance with Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble to call, he says, “Anthony is a hell of a musician, and we shouldn’t typecast Brendan and Joe’s expanse is amazing, inspiring. We’re all approaching the music with humility and openness and curiosity – it’s not about ‘my thing’ or ‘their thing’. It’s not about ego. It’s about understanding what the music is telling us, what the music needs. Sometimes that can seem a little esoteric to some people, but I mean it in the sense of play, like a child.
“The greatest joy I feel when I’m playing with these guys is that I don’t have the pressures of leading my own group,” he adds, with a chuckle. “This is no knock against my own ensemble, but being a bandleader is different. When I’m with The Messthetics, I get back to the original essence of why I started to do this: to play. I love the energy. I love the audiences. And Anthony and I have such a beautiful camaraderie, and our tones fit together so well sometimes we can’t even tell who’s playing on which part. And also, they’re good humans. There comes a point in your life where you’re like, ‘Man, it’s cool to play with good-hearted, good-natured people’.”
“One of the first things James said early on was, ‘I want to rock!’” says Lally. “We were like, ‘Well, we can do that.’ But I feel now, James wants to groove, and that’s all that really matters to me. Let’s make it happen, let’s open things up. It’s no different than what I’ve always been trying to do since Fugazi, really – if we can put that solid base in place, then everyone is free to do what they want to do. ”
While The Messthetics find Canty and Lally fully invested in their futures, their past still has a habit of resurfacing. 2025 had seen the low-key release of We Are Fugazi From Washington DC. Originally completed in 2022 the widely praised movie, “curated” by Joe Gross, Jeff Krulik and Joseph Pattisall, is a “non-documentary” collating fan-filmed footage from the audience of early Fugazi performances.
“It focuses on the first year or so of Fugazi,” explains Canty, “and it’s cool to see that earliest incarnation, before Guy really started playing guitar with us. Instead, you get to see him be the most incredible, flailing frontman. My daughter thought he was the best frontman who has ever lived. And he’s ‘Uncle Guy’ to everybody in my family here, so they could not believe how incredible he was onstage.” “Just to sit there in a big cinema and watch us play was definitely really heavy for me,” says Lally. “I was really moved by it; it fucked with me.”
The group have also begun uploading old live tapes to mainstream streaming sites, having been selling them via their Fugazi Live Series website for a number of years. “I feel like a Phish fan,” grins Canty. “I come home and enter a fugue state, just listening to old live tapes. I haven’t listened to them all. But Ian has. Having them up on the streaming sites will finally make them more accessible. I don’t think many people were checking out the Fugazi Live Series website, but I was on there all the time, because I’m always trying to remember the last time I played a town, where we played, who opened up for us.”
Even with all this archival legacy activity, it’s clear the days of Fugazi are retreating further in the distance for the group’s former rhythm section. It’s equally clear that that hiatus shows no sign of ending, even if the group’s diehard fans wish that wasn’t the case. “Everybody keeps calling me, thinking we can fix this Trump problem somehow,” grins Canty. “They’re all like, ‘You know, this would be a great time for Fugazi to come back’. And I don’t know what they think we’re going to be able to do about this. But I do appreciate the idea that we have superpowers.”
The Messthetics perform at Cagliari’s Siren Festival, which takes place from July 10 to 13, 2025. Find more information here.
