The Messthetics

Deface The Currency, the new second collaborative album from the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, grew out of a simple intuition. The group — with saxophonist Lewis joining the core Messthetics lineup of Brendan Canty on drums, Joe Lally on bass and Anthony Pirog on guitar — was on tour in the summer of 2025 when Canty knew it was time to go back into the studio. The Messthetics formed in 2016 in Washington, D.C., drawn together by mutual admiration: Pirog had grown up listening to Fugazi, the era-defining post-hardcore band anchored by the rhythm section of Lally and Canty, while the bassist and drummer heard the genre-spanning guitar visionary play around town and took note of his unusually inclusive aesthetic. Pirog had played and bonded with Lewis before the Messthetics formed, and in 2019, he invited the saxophonist — whose massive, soulful sound has made him a star of the contemporary jazz scene — to sit in with the group live. The collaboration blossomed and eventually led to an acclaimed self-titled album via Impulse!, the legendary jazz label. But as the quartet logged serious time on the road, Canty felt their chemistry evolving, so he called up engineer Don Godwin and booked a couple of days at Tonal Park in Takoma Park, Maryland. “The more you know someone, the better the relationship is, the more enriched it becomes,” Lewis says of Deface The Currency. “It’s like a cast-iron skillet: The more you keep cooking in it, the better the food gets.”