[1] Following Downie's diagnosis with terminal brain cancer in 2015, the band undertook a tour of Canada in support of their thirteenth album, Man Machine Poem.
[5] The surviving members have, however, continued to pursue other musical projects, and have begun releasing deluxe reissues of their albums featuring previously unreleased songs from the band's archives.
Baker and Sinclair joined with Downie and Fay in 1984 and began playing gigs around Kingston with some memorable stints at Clark Hall Pub and Alfie's, student bars on Queen's University campus.
[6] By the mid-1980s, they performed in small music venues across Ontario until being seen by then-MCA Vice President Bruce Dickinson at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto.
During the Road Apples tour, Downie became recognized for ranting and telling fictional stories during songs such as "Highway Girl" and "New Orleans Is Sinking".
Although the band failed to achieve significant international success with these first two albums, their sales and dominance of modern rock radio in Canada gave them license to subsequently explore their sound.
The band released another album, Fully Completely in 1992, which produced the singles "Locked in the Trunk of a Car", "Courage", "At the Hundredth Meridian", and three others.
The Hip created and headlined the first Another Roadside Attraction tour at this time, which also featured Midnight Oil, Crash Vegas, Hothouse Flowers and Daniel Lanois.
"Nautical Disaster" was played frequently in the middle of "New Orleans Is Sinking", an early version of "Thugs" was tested, and Downie sang lyrics from many other Day For Night songs, such as "Grace, Too", "Scared", and "Emergency", during this tour.
The three-day concert took place at Mosport Park, in Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada, just a few months after the LP Trouble at the Henhouse was released.
In 2002, In Violet Light, recorded by Hugh Padgham and Terry Manning at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas was released, along with three singles from the album.
[17] Later that year, the Hip made a cameo appearance in the Paul Gross film Men with Brooms, playing a curling team from their hometown of Kingston.
In 2003, the band recorded a cover of "Black Day in July", a song about the 1967 12th Street Riot in Detroit, on Beautiful: A Tribute to Gordon Lightfoot.
At the 92nd Grey Cup held November 21, 2004, the band provided the halftime entertainment in front of a packed house at Frank Clair Stadium in Ottawa.
[20] In 2004, in episode 15 ("Rock On"), season 2 of Canadian comedy TV series Corner Gas, the Tragically Hip gave a cameo appearance as an unnamed local band rehearsing in Brent's garage.
They play a rough version of the song It Can't Be Nashville Every Night from their In Between Evolution album until interrupted and asked to leave by Brent, Wanda, and Hank.
[21] In October 2005, several radio stations temporarily stopped playing "New Orleans Is Sinking", out of sensitivity to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which had devastated the city in early September of that year.
[22][23][24] However, it received considerable pirate radio and relief site play and gained some notoriety and praise in New Orleans due to its attitudinal proximity to the city's culture.
On November 1, 2005, the Hip released a double CD, double DVD box set, Hipeponymous, including all of their singles and music videos to date, a backstage documentary called "Macroscopic", an animated Hip-scored short film entitled "The Right Whale", two brand new songs ("No Threat" and "The New Maybe"), a full-length concert from November 2004 That Night in Toronto, and a 2-CD greatest hits collection Yer Favourites (selected on-line by 150,000 fans).
The final concert of the Man Machine Poem tour was held at the Rogers K-Rock Centre in the band's hometown of Kingston on August 20, 2016.
[3] The CBC's broadcast and live streaming of the concert, uninterrupted by advertisements, was watched by 11.7 million people (roughly one-third of the Canadian population).
[39] Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is a fan of the Tragically Hip, released a tribute statement on his official website the morning after Downie's death.
[44] In July 2018, guitarist Rob Baker told Entertainment Tonight Canada that the Tragically Hip were no longer active as a touring or recording entity following Downie's death.
[5] With the legalization of marijuana in Canada, the remaining band members became investment partners in Newstrike, a cannabis company which has named several of its products after Tragically Hip songs.
[45] In a July 2018 interview with the Toronto Sun, Baker confirmed that at least three albums' worth of unreleased material was recorded with Downie before his death, but stated that the band had yet to decide how it would be released.
[47] On October 17, 2018, one year after Downie's death, a previously unreleased studio recording of the song "Wait So Long" was played on CIKR-FM, a radio station in the band's hometown of Kingston.
[50] On September 14, 2019, Langlois, Sinclair and Baker performed a set at Rockin' the Big House, a benefit concert on the grounds of the former Kingston Penitentiary, with guest vocalists Hugh Dillon and Tom Cochrane.
[70] The Tragically Hip's music is extremely popular in their native Canada, and Downie's songwriting has been praised for frequently touching upon uniquely Canadian subjects not otherwise covered by mainstream rock groups.
"[74] According to Nielsen BDS, the Tragically Hip were the fourth best-selling Canadian musical artist in Canada between 1996 and 2016, behind only Céline Dion, Shania Twain and Michael Bublé.
"[75] Despite their high popularity in Canada, the group was never able to cross over into the American rock music scene apart from a small, devoted fan-base centered in border cities like Buffalo, New York.