DISCOVER: THE MESSTHETICS
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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.
This configuration of the band had debuted on record the year prior, releasing an acclaimed self-titled album via Impulse!, the legendary jazz label. But as the quartet logged serious time on the road, the drummer felt their chemistry evolving, so he called up engineer Don Godwin and booked a couple of days at Tonal Park in Takoma Park, Maryland, where The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis was recorded.
“The driving impulse was to not let a moment in time go away when you have a band that’s really jelling with one another emotionally and musically,” Canty recalls.
The plan was never to track an entire album — rather just to capture a few songs that they’d been playing live. But once the sessions began, it became clear that the group was ready to make its next full-length statement.
Deface the Currency preserves the tightness and variety of its predecessor, but across the album’s seven tracks, it reveals new levels of confidence and risk. On pieces such as the title track — named after a quote from Greek philosopher Diogenes that speaks to challenging societal norms — and a new version of “Serpent Tongue,” which first appeared on the Messthetics’ self-titled 2018 debut, the quartet reaches ecstatic peaks that convey fun as much as ferocity. More than any earlier statement by the band, the record seamlessly melds the sounds that make up its collective DNA, from punk rock to free jazz and funk, balancing compositional precision with palpable improvisational fire.
“I like making nice, carefully orchestrated records,” Canty says. “But I also really like to bring abandon into the studio, because I think people hear that difference.”
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 the quartet’s 2024 LP.
As strong as that effort was, it documented a union that was still in its infancy: The trio worked up most of the material apart from Lewis and then rehearsed with the saxophonist for just one day before entering the studio.
“We literally were not a band that did what bands do at that point that we made the first record,” Lally notes.
The quartet’s subsequent extensive touring brought about a very different result on Deface the Currency. “The more you know someone, the better the relationship is, the more enriched it becomes,” Lewis says. “It’s like a cast-iron skillet: The more you keep cooking in it, the better the food gets. So I think that’s what you hear on the record, and you hear an urgency of now.”
The band’s heightened communication comes through in Deface the Currency’s many surprising dynamic shifts. On “Universal Security,” Pirog and Lewis’s floating melody, played over a waltz-time pulse from Lally and Canty, segues into the saxophonist improvising against a wall of richly textured guitar noise. And “Gestations,” which layers a bebop-esque line atop a taut funk groove, holds its energy in reserve before revving up to an explosive climax that suggests doom metal meets Ask the Ages, guitarist Sonny Sharrock’s 1991 avant-jazz masterpiece, which the quartet has recently covered in concert.
“We just started recording things and getting them down in first or second takes,” Pirog recalls of the Tonal Park session. “I don't think we were expecting to finish the record that quickly, but we were just so in the zone of playing together that it was pretty easy.”
Their collective instincts served them equally well on the album’s mellower moments, such as the Wayne Shorter–esque “30 Years of Knowing,” as on the tracks that reach full roar, including “Rules of the Game,” with its hard-funk stomp that earned it the Parliament-nodding provisional title of “Mr. Wiggles,” or the grinding, anthemic “Clutch,” which exemplifies what Lewis calls a “wounded warrior, ‘we will prevail’ type vibe.”
The album as a whole — a statement of vigor, sensitivity and spontaneity — shows that Canty’s initial instincts were correct: Through playing night after night, the quartet had reached new territory.
“The band has become its own thing, and it’s become its own different thing,” the drummer says, “a collective, an actual group.”
DISCOVER: JAMES BRANDON LEWIS
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