Isaac Delahaye — born in Belgium in 1982 — has been Epica's guitarist since 2009, having replaced Ad Sluijter. His arrival coincides with Design Your Universe (2009), the album on which the band considerably widened the scale of its orchestral arrangements and consolidated the format it would practise afterwards. He has since recorded all the group's output, including The Quantum Enigma (2014), Omega (2021) and Aspiral (2025). His function carries a demand that is not obvious. In an arrangement already including orchestra, choir, symphonic keyboards, lyric soprano and guttural vocals, the guitar has to find room of its own without overloading the whole. Delahaye works with precisely cut riffs and short, melodic solos, functioning as an element of contrast within an already dense sonic mass — the opposite of what is expected of a metal guitarist, who usually occupies the foreground. He came from God Dethroned, the Dutch death metal band, the same origin as drummer Ariën van Weesenbeek — the two brought to Epica an extreme metal vocabulary that balances the symphonic weight of the repertoire.
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