"I approached this record as a more rounded player"

Nita Strauss can shred with the best of them, but her new solo album features 'radio songs' with guest-star vocalists - plus a showdown with mentor Marty Friedman

- Amit Sharma

It's been a rollercoaster couple of years for Nita Strauss. In October 2021, she topped the American rock charts with Dead Inside, which saw her team up with Disturbed vocalist David Draiman. Last summer, the American guitarist - who made history in 2018 as Ibanez's first female signature artist - left her position in the Alice Cooper band to join forces with pop star Demi Lovato. And now, having toured again with Alice, she returns with her long-awaited second solo album, The Call Of The Void.

While the predecessor, 2018's Controlled Chaos, was a completely instrumental affair, her latest venture sees her going the other way with more vocal-led tracks, including features with Alissa White-Gluz (Arch Enemy), Anders Fridén (In Flames) and even Alice Cooper himself. So what made her decide to switch things up?

"It started out as one or two collaborations and then it just snowballed, "Nita says. "I guess it just evolved that way. At one point my label said 'Why not just release two separate albums?' But I felt it would end up giving more attention to the one with all the features and radio songs. The instrumentals, which are what I mainly love and want to do, would have fallen by the wayside.

"I worked very hard to make the album I wanted to make. My label were very supportive. They signed me as an instrumental solo artist with no inclination that I'd give them a song like Dead Inside, which ended up being a number one song. They even suggested doing the first half instrumental and the second with vocals, or vice versa, and I said, 'No, because I want to lay it out in a certain way and tell a story'. They listened and it ended up exactly how it should be..."

Talking to TG from her home studio, Nita discusses the key tracks on the album and the creative process behind them...