Are Video Games Where the Best New Music Lives? Let’s Talk About It.
This song is incredibly chaotic but wholly coherent. “Last Shot” is by templuv, an electronic music duo, and 347aidan, a Canadian rapper. It was commissioned as the 2025 Valorant Champions tournament anthem for Valorant, a popular first-person shooter game.
I love this track so much because if it had popped up on some random kid’s SoundCloud page, I would have pointed at it and said, “That’s what right now sounds like.” One of the things that’s so great about this song is how it shifts every 10 or 15 seconds. At one moment, it feels emotionally desperate; the next, it becomes really pugnacious.
You can hear the long tail of groups like Brokencyde—it’s really Warped Tour familiar. The breakdown in the middle feels incredibly indebted to Lil Peep.
For more than two decades, video games have doubled as discovery engines for new music. Hip-hop has lived alongside pop, rock, and pop punk, helping make generations of young people truly genre-agnostic.
I’m thinking of titles like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, NBA 2K, and Fortnite—all games that have shaped music discovery in unique ways.
Do I love video games? Absolutely!
https://www.nytimes.com/video/podcasts/100000010463758/are-video-games-giving-us-some-of-the-best-new-music.html