Brendan Canty says he would happily play with Fugazi again, and he is not closing the door on it happening.
The drummer was speaking to Consequence about his work scoring film and television, including the documentary “Stolen Kingdom“, when the conversation turned to the band’s status nearly a quarter of a century after their last concert.
“Luckily, we’re all still friends,” Canty said of Ian MacKaye, Guy Picciotto and Joe Lally. “We don’t play live, but we get together all the time, and we see each other and communicate all the time… We put out that In on the Kill Taker Albini Sessions for charity [earlier this] year.”
On whether he would want to be back onstage with them:
“Do I wish we could keep playing? Yes. I wish we could all be out there playing now. I love those songs. I love writing with those guys, but we’ll see.”
He also admitted he expected the band to be forgotten once they stopped.
“When Fugazi did go on hiatus, I was like, ‘Oh well, that’s it. Nobody’s gonna give a s**t about this band after this,’ and that’s not what happened. I’m very happy to have people continue to give a s**t about my band.”
Asked directly about the odds of a reunion, he answered: “I never say never.”
The four have not performed since November 2002. The hiatus was announced the following year and has never formally ended.
They have not stopped collaborating, though. In March, Fugazi released Albini Sessions (Benefit For Letters Charity) through Dischord, the shelved 1992 recordings of In On The Kill Taker made with Steve Albini, issued digitally through Bandcamp with all proceeds going to charity.
The band explained the decision in a statement: “To honor Steve, who died in 2024, and to support the work that he and his wife, Heather Whinna, have done with the non-profit Letters Charity organization, Fugazi has decided to make Steve’s entire original mix officially available for the first time in transfers pulled directly from the master tapes.”
Letters Charity gives money directly to families in financial hardship, without conditions attached. Albini died in 2024 at 61.
The recordings had been a bootleg legend for three decades. Fugazi cut the entire album with Albini in Chicago in November 1992, then drove home in two cars, each carrying rough mixes on cassette.
The two groups stopped at a rest area in Ohio and discovered they had independently reached the same conclusion, outside the studio, the songs sounded flat. Albini wrote to them days later with the same verdict, and the sessions were shelved by mutual agreement.
Within a month the band was at Inner Ear Studio in Arlington, Virginia, re-recording with Ted Nicely. Dischord released In On The Kill Taker in June 1993.
Fugazi formed in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s and built their following without the industry. Tickets were five dollars. Records came out on MacKaye‘s own Dischord Records. The approach was the point, and it held for fifteen years.
Canty now plays with Lally in The Messthetics and works extensively as a composer for screen.
