Zacky Vengeance

Zacky Vengeance — Zachary Baker, born in 1981 — is Avenged Sevenfold's rhythm guitarist and co-founder, present since the band formed in 1999. His role is structural, and the least noticed of all. In a band where Synyster Gates occupies the foreground with solos of jazz vocabulary and M. Shadows carries the melody, it falls to Vengeance to write and sustain the riffs that give the songs their shape — the part the audience sings without realising it is singing guitar. Much of the rhythmic material defining "Bat Country", "Almost Easy" and "Nightmare" is his. That role comes from his origins. Vengeance came out of Californian punk and hardcore, not technical metal, and it is that more direct grounding that counterbalances Gates's refinement. The pair works through difference: one builds the floor, the other moves freely above it. He is on the whole discography, from Sounding the Seventh Trumpet (2001) to Life Is But a Dream... (2023), across the change of direction of City of Evil, the death of The Rev in 2009 and the successive reinventions of the more recent records.