2112

Caress of Steel sold badly and the tour behind it drew shrinking crowds. Mercury considered dropping the band. Manager Ray Danniels flew to the label's Chicago offices and won them one more album, even though he had not heard any of it. Pressed to make something more commercial, the band went the other way. Peart said they decided that 2112 would have to be the realization of all their hopes.

They recorded in January 1976 at Toronto Sound Studios with Terry Brown producing and engineering. Lifeson said it was the first Rush album that really sounded like Rush. Side one is the title piece, a seven-part story set in the year 2112 in which a man finds a guitar in a world where music is outlawed. Peart credited Ayn Rand's novella Anthem in the liner notes, and the NME writer Barry Miles accused the band of being fascists. Lee, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, defended the piece as an anti-totalitarian story. Hugh Syme played ARP Odyssey synthesizer on the Overture and Mellotron on Tears, and his cover introduced the Starman logo.

Side two holds five shorter songs: A Passage to Bangkok, The Twilight Zone, Lessons, Tears and Something for Nothing. Lee wrote the words of Tears and Lifeson those of Lessons. The album reached number five in Canada and number sixty-one in the United States, the first Rush record to enter the American top one hundred. It went gold in November 1977 and has sold more than four million copies in the United States. The tour ran from February 1976 to June 1977, took the band to Europe for the first time, and its Massey Hall shows in Toronto became All the World's a Stage.