Welcome to Critical Hit, where I (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.
Despite my experience with League of Legends (the videogame) being incredibly minimal, I've spent years in admiration and awe at League of Legends (the music). Riot has found a real knack for taking its champs and turning them into bona fide popstars, rockstars, and hip-hop stars—bringing in talented and well-established artists across the globe and carving out a space in the mainstream music world with certified bangers fronted by fictional characters.
Some might argue (it's me, I'm some) that Riot Music found the height of its success towards the end of the 2010s with the likes of K-pop girl group K/DA's Pop/Stars and hip-hop group True Damage and their song Giants. The former, in particular, made waves when it released—it topped charts and led to K/DA becoming the first K-pop girl group to be certified platinum. That's not to say it hasn't done anything good since, mind, as 2023 saw Riot convert six of its champs into the boyband Heartsteel, with a distinctly cheeky vibe.
It makes it even more surprising, then, that Riot Music has barely done a thing with any group in the years since. K/DA returned in 2020 with a new look and new EP—which was a banger, by the way—but True Damage and Heartsteel were one-hit wonders, and K/DA has lain dormant for the last six years.
Until now, that is. Over the last couple months, as League of Legends ramps up for its annual Worlds finals, it's been bringing them back from the dead. Heartsteel was the first to make a comeback with the significantly softer Live My Life, and it was… fine. Certainly not my favourite, and the kind of vibe shift I hadn't quite expected from its previous bad-boy persona.
Next came True Damage with Know My Name. It's probably the group that feels closest to its old tone, though I'm sincerely missing Keke Palmer's vocals this time around. The thing that made me more sad with this group's return is its music video—listen, I know Faker is a big deal. But the thing I love with these groups are the champs it puts forward. Having an entire music video dedicated to T1 with barely a glimpse of the champs who serve as a mascot for the song defeats the point of these fictional groups in the first place, at least for me.
But it feels like Riot was saving up all its hype (and perhaps budget) for the return of K/DA. It is still wild to me that the developer has sat on one of the biggest mainstream successes it's seen—I literally only played League of Legends a few months ago, while I've owned the Secretlab K/DA chair for over five years, for example—but the wait has truly been worth it.
It feels like someone at Riot Music really understands what makes K-pop as moreish as it is, because new single Firestarter has been on non-stop repeat for me since it came out. It also brought Fortiche on board for the music video—that's the studio behind both Arcane's animation and the original Pop/Stars MV—for a real full-budget experience.
K/DA is also the only one of the three to get more than one song out of its revival. The group has a four-song EP that just landed, one which grew on me massively over the course of, erm, listening to it on repeat for six hours straight. But it's one that boasts immense production value, as well as the benefit of having K-pop superstars Soyeon and Miyeon from I-dle returning and giving K/DA that much-needed familiar sound.
I think in a battle of the League of Legends bands, K/DA was always going to emerge victorious. It's the one that broke MOBA containment, after all. But with the group sharing the joint stage alongside True Damage during the Worlds finals in New York next month, it's clear Riot has its favourite. And can I blame them? Absolutely not, because K/DA is my favourite too.