November 5th, 2015 — Burbank, CA — Avenged Sevenfold have announced that drummer Brooks Wackerman has joined the band. Hailing from Long Beach, Calif., Wackerman was the main drummer for Bad Religion for more than 15 years and also played with Tenacious D for the last 10 years. He has also played with blink-182, Mass Mental with Metallica’s Robert Trujillo, funk metal supergroup Infectious Grooves, and Korn. Wackerman has known the members of Avenged Sevenfold since meeting them on the Warped Tour in 2004.

“Jimmy [‘The Rev’ Sullivan’] and I always had a mutual respect for each other’s drumming styles,” Wackerman says of A7X’s original drummer who passed away in 2009. “He was always amazing and innovative, and it’s an honor to play his parts live. I look forward to recording this new record with A7X, a band that I’ve always respected for their creativity and diversity in sound.”

Avenged singer M. Shadows and Wackerman made the announcement on Chris Jericho’s “Talk Is Jericho” podcast, which aired yesterday on PodcastOne.

Avenged Sevenfold has achieved worldwide success with a string of best-selling albums achieving Diamond, Platinum and Gold awards for album sales in nearly a dozen countries. They have scored a series of Top 10 singles at multiple radio formats, with two consecutive albums, Nightmare, and Hail to the King, debuting at #1 on Billboard Top 200 in the U.S with a total worldwide sales of over 8 million albums. Hailing from Huntington Beach, CA, the band is known internationally for their spectacular live shows, routinely selling out arenas worldwide and headlining some of the world’s biggest and most prestigious music festivals. Over the years, Avenged Sevenfold has built a fanatical fan base that includes over 17 million fans on Facebook. They also were part of an unprecedented collaboration with Activision to appear as characters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 — the biggest-selling video game of all time, and wrote “Carry On” for the game. They also wrote “Not Ready to Die” for Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies DLC. Last year, the band debuted their own action adventure role-playing game, Hail to the King: Deathbat, which features classic Avenged Sevenfold tracks along with a new and original score. Most recently, the band collaborated with “Guitar Hero Live,” offering three exclusive tracks that can be played within the game, which was released on October 20th.