Are Video Games Giving Us Some of the Best New Music?

Are video games where the best new music lives? Get in. Let’s talk about it. So this song is incredibly chaotic but wholly coherent. “Last Shot” is by templuv, which is an electronic music duo, and 347aidan, who is a Canadian rapper. Valorant is a first-person shooter game, and this song was commissioned to be the 2025 Valorant Champion tournament anthem. I like it so much because if it had popped up on some random kid’s SoundCloud page, I would have pointed at it and said, That — that’s what right now sounds like. One of the things that’s so great about this song is it shifts every 10 or 15 seconds. In one moment it’s, like, emotionally desperate, and the other — it’s, like, really pugnacious. You’re hearing the long tail of groups like Brokencyde. It’s really, really Warped Tour familiar. The breakdown in the middle feels incredibly indebted to Lil Peep. For more than two decades, video games have kind of doubled as discovery engines for new music. You had hip-hop living alongside pop, living alongside rock, alongside pop punk. It’s really helped make generations of young people genre agnostic. I’m thinking of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, NBA 2K, Fortnite. Do I love video games?!