Andy LaRocque — Anders Allhage, born in Sweden in 1962 — has been King Diamond's guitarist since 1985 and is the only musician besides the singer himself to appear across the band's entire discography. His function goes well beyond playing solos. On the group's concept albums it is he who builds the harmonic architecture that carries the narrative: key changes that follow turns in the plot, motifs that return when a character reappears, textures that separate what is happening from what is being remembered. It is a composer's work as much as an instrumentalist's, and much of the band's material bears his signature. Outside King Diamond he left a lasting mark in another territory: he recorded a lead guitar on Death's Individual Thought Patterns (1993) at Chuck Schuldiner's invitation — a meeting between European melodic metal and American technical death metal that was unusual for the time. He is also a producer. His Sonic Train studio in Sweden recorded dozens of European metal albums over the following decades, which makes him a presence in the scene well beyond the bands he played in.
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