Zacky Vengeance, founding guitarist of Avenged Sevenfold, has released “Lighthouse,” his second solo single under his real name, Zachary Baker. The full-length Dark Horse follows on 04/03 via his own Vngnz Records label.
Growing up in Olympia, Washington, Zacky was influenced by punk rock and metal bands. He picked up the guitar at a young age, inspired by bands like Metallica and Misfits. His first guitar was a hand-me-down from his father, which he used to hone his skills and develop his signature style.
As a founding member of Avenged Sevenfold, Zacky has played a crucial role in the band’s dynamic. His rhythm guitar work complements lead guitarist Synyster Gates, creating a powerful and cohesive sound. Together, they have crafted some of the most memorable riffs and solos in modern metal.
The album’s title track arrived in December, blending Americana influences with personal storytelling — a deliberate step away from his hard rock roots. Speaking to Rock Feed, Vengeance was direct about where the project came from: “Honestly, it just came from a place inside of me that I didn’t fully know existed,” he said. “It was just this longing to create something using my own voice, telling my own story, adhering to the rules that I wanted to follow, which are far different from what you’d get from a lot of producers or a lot of record labels.”
He reached back into years of lived experience to fuel it: “Just taking everything that I’ve ever learned — from the entirety of the first time I ever picked up a guitar to the first time we ever filled up our van with gas and drove on the back roads using a shitty old Rand McNally map to get to the next city, and driving across the country, stopping every single place, the fights we would get into, the stories that we would have, drunken nights, just everything.”
“I wanted to capture all of that, stories of falling in love and stories of loss and all the heartache — everything that’s real about me, but I wanted to sing it in my own voice, which is something that I never really loved. I never really liked my own voice, so I was, like, ‘I don’t have one of these great voices,’ like a great rock singer or a great country artist who has all these pitch-perfect vocals. And then I was, like, ‘But I gotta get it outta me.’ And I didn’t know why or how it even came about, but it was literally like a therapy session.”
On the musical direction, he was equally clear about what this record is and what it isn’t: “This is very real. It’s not a humor album. It’s not contrived in any way. I’m not gonna throw on a cowboy hat and boots and try to make my way to Nashville. I’m going to remember that I love going to Nashville. I named my son Tennessee. I’ve spent vacations in Gatlinburg, and I’ve been to West Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia, and I love being in Oregon and fishing.”
“And I’ve done everything in between. I’ve lived a lot of life, and now I get to tell my story. I get to sing it in my own voice. It’s gonna piss a whole lot of people off. Everything about this is great.”
The early reactions from people around him were lukewarm, and he admits it hit hard: “In the very first few songs, the reaction was completely, like, ‘Huh. Yeah. Okay, okay. Well, when are you guys gonna write the next ‘Hail to the King’?’ And I was, like, ‘Never. That’s not how we operate.’ And it kind of made me get in my own head a little bit. I started developing a little bit of timidness about, ‘No one’s gonna take this seriously.’ I kind of got depressed about it.”
“And then I just found myself, throughout the early days of bringing this to life and thinking about how it was really helping me write these songs and helping me feel better in these therapy sessions and getting stuff off my chest, I kind of got depressed again. I started drinking a whole lot, and I was, like, ‘I’m just not gonna do anything. I’ll wait till Avenged goes back on tour.’ And it’s kind of like waiting to die.”
What changed his mind was watching Avenged Sevenfold take the same kind of risk on a larger scale and come out the other side.
“Avenged, we kind of had this kumbaya moment where we’re like, let’s just be fearless and let’s make Life Is But a Dream… and do whatever we want and make the art alongside Wes Lang, who’s one of the greatest artists that we love, and let’s make these songs that people are not know what to expect… And then next thing you know, we’re playing in front of 40,000 people in India and selling out stadiums in Indonesia and headlining and selling out Rock In Rio off an album that the radio stations wouldn’t even play.”
“And it’s just, like, we have fans that respect what we do. And it gave me this excitement, like, ‘Hey, stop drinking yourself to death. Find purpose in every day. Finish these songs. When you get sad, when you’re depressed, put the bottle down, march up in the studio, start saying your truth. Tell your story. Be honest and be open. You’re not perfect.'”
He kept the recording process deliberately stripped down and closed off — no producers, no outside opinions: “I’m so far from perfect as a person, but I’m very much myself. I’m uniquely me. My music sounds like me. It’s coming from my voice. It’s my story. I was, like, ‘What do I like about it?’ I love that it’s imperfect. I haven’t changed the guitar strings on this old Telecaster in three months. They’re rusty. My fingers are bleeding. It’s perfect. I love how it sounds. This thing’s a little bit out of tune. I can’t really hit that note. My voice is cracking. The mic’s a little too hot. There’s a buzz on it. It’s perfect. I like this. I love this.”
The decision to work without a producer was intentional and non-negotiable: “For this first attempt at it, it had to be me finding myself, creating and then breaking any rules that I thought existed. And I didn’t wanna get into a studio with a producer. I didn’t want the input. I didn’t want people to tell me what is possible and what’s not possible. I knew it would be dead in the water because the second that I opened up and showed it to certain people — and this isn’t my band, by the way; this is management or friends or whatever — they instantly shut it down. They didn’t like it. They didn’t get it. They didn’t understand it. I was, like, ‘I can’t show this to anybody until I do it.'”
Those people, he acknowledged, came at it from a business angle: “Of course. And it’s been the bane of our existence for so long. People look at bands as, ‘Oh, you did ‘Hail to the King’. It has the most streams. We need another ‘Hail to the King’.’ It’s, like, that’s not how it works. We didn’t set out to write ‘A Little Piece of Heaven’ to try to mimic some other hit song. We didn’t write ‘Hail to the King’ with the intention of trying to write a hit. We didn’t write ‘Bat Country’. Our songs are crazy. They’re ambitious. ‘The Stage’… It’s not how it works.”
On the album’s release, he said the priority was giving the music space to land the right way.
“I really wanna get it out early-ish in 2026. I’m so excited to share it, and I don’t have this hard-pressed timeline. I know it’s important. I love the artwork. I love the idea of putting out a vinyl record. All that’s getting built now. Everything’s completely finished. And it’s just giving it enough time for people to hear ‘Dark Horse’ and make their determination on if it’s sincere enough for them.”
“If they like it, if they hate it, if they find it to be gimmicky — that’s just not gonna happen. That’s one thing that’s not gonna happen. They’re gonna hear it and say, ‘Okay, this is real. There’s sincerity behind this. This is a side of Zack that we didn’t fully know. But it makes sense.'”
