The Messthetics Tickets

Joe Lally was onstage, playing at full throttle, when he realized that his band had found a true
kindred spirit. It was the fall of 2021 and the Messthetics — the instrumental trio of Lally on
bass, his former Fugazi bandmate Brendan Canty on drums and guitarist Anthony Pirog —
were at Brooklyn venue the Bell House, digging into their uptempo riff workout “Serpent
Tongue.” Joining them for the piece was a special guest, acclaimed jazz saxophonist James
Brandon Lewis, making only his second cameo with the group after a drop-in at another New
York show back in 2019. That first meeting had been a success, but this time, Lewis’ presence
sparked something new.
“It pushed the song like crazy,” Lally recalls of a passage when Lewis and Pirog began trading
fiery solos. As the intensity kept building, the bassist felt simultaneously challenged and
exhilarated. “You’re just holding on and going, ‘It sounds great,’” he remembers telling himself.
“‘Just keep going.’”
That imperative — the sense that there was more to explore within what began as an ad hoc
union among the four musicians — lingered after the performance ended. Now, Lewis, Pirog,
Lally and Canty are ready to unveil their first full-length album as a quartet. Recorded in just two
days in December 2022 at Takoma Park, Maryland, studio Tonal Park, with engineer Don
Godwin, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis features nine tracks that capture the
combustive chemistry Lally originally sensed onstage while expanding the collaboration in all
directions. Across the album, due out on March 15th via the legendary Impulse! label, the
quartet can be heard locking into a hard, swaggering funk groove on “That Thang,” cradling a
wistful, jazz-like theme on “Asthenia” or rocketing into ecstatic art-punk overdrive on
“Emergence.”