Michael Ehré

Michael Ehré has been Gamma Ray's drummer since 2012, when he took the place left by Dan Zimmermann. Born in 1971, he arrived with an already long career on the German scene: he passed through Metalium, the Hamburg power metal band, and built a reputation as a dependable musician across very different contexts. His task was not simple. Zimmermann had held the stool for fifteen years and defined the rhythmic sound of the group's best-known phase — succeeding someone like that means performing, night after night, a repertoire written and recorded by another drummer, with the exactness the audience knows by heart. Ehré solved this with solid technique and a slightly more modern sound, without trying to rewrite what was already canonical. He recorded Empire of the Undead (2014), so far the band's most recent studio album, and remains in the current line-up alongside Kai Hansen, Henjo Richter, Dirk Schlächter and Frank Beck. He keeps other projects going in parallel, among them The Unity, a band drawing on members of Gamma Ray itself and one that gives Ehré the writing space a hired drummer's role rarely offers.