This guitar influencer's debut single is one of the best instrumental shred tracks you'll hear this year

Alyssa Day has built an Instagram following of over 80,000 fans, all mesmerized by her jaw-dropping electric guitar chops. So it’s no surprise that her official debut solo single is one of the strongest and most well-crafted instrumental guitar tracks of the year to date.

Sure, Day has honed her compositional skills as guitarist for Florida-based death metal outfit Mindscar – the same band that once hosted Trivium’s Matt Heafy – since 2016, but on the all-new Dread & Dream, her songwriting is permitted to run rampant, as she pieces together a sonic tapestry of frantic dual leads, subtle whammy bar flutters, effortless sweeps and just about everything else in a guitar player’s arsenal.

In the track’s accompanying music video, which can be seen below, Day’s serpentine shredding is complemented by an actual snake, which slithers over her American Series Soloist SL3, a model launched by Jackson earlier this month and notably the first to be made entirely at Fender’s factory in Corona, California.

Alyssa Day is one of a handful of artists chosen to help promote the new model’s launch, alongside the likes of Anthrax’s Scott Ian, Periphery’s Misha Mansoor and The Black Dahlia Murder’s Brandon Ellis, who put the guitar through its paces in a recent episode of Jackson’s Soloist YouTube series.

In a recent interview with Australian Musician, Day addresses being a female metal guitarist in a traditionally male-dominated genre.

“I instantly connected with [metal music] the second I heard it,” she said. “It never occurred to me that it was male-dominated until people started pointing it out when I was in my teen years.

On whether the proportion of female musicians and fans in the genre was increasing, Day said: “The internet [has become] a more ubiquitous tool in the last decade or two. 

“I don’t know if it’s because we can just see more of the females, or if there was always that percentage who were interested in heavier music, or if it’s generating some more interest amongst the female demographic. That would be really cool if it was. I personally have seen more girls interested in it, which is super cool.”

Dread & Dream will appear on Alyssa Day’s upcoming debut EP, Ruinous, which can be presaved now on both Spotify and Apple Music.