Riot Put Metalcore on the Champions Anthem | BuyBoosting

Nah, this one actually goes hard. Riot dropped the VCT Champions Shanghai anthem yesterday, and for once it is not a polished corporate pop track with a guitar sample bolted on for credibility. Oli Sykes. Courtney LaPlante. Grabbitz on the production. That is a genuinely heavy lineup for an esports anthem, and I did not see it coming.

What Actually Happened

Here is the news, plain. The anthem for Champions in Shanghai features Oli Sykes of Bring Me the Horizon and Courtney LaPlante of Spiritbox, with Grabbitz handling the production side. It landed yesterday and the timeline did exactly what the timeline does. Half the replies were people losing their minds, the other half were people asking who these singers even are.

For that second group, quick catch-up. Sykes has been screaming into arenas for the better part of two decades, and his band quietly became one of the biggest rock acts on the planet while nobody in gaming was paying attention. LaPlante is the reason her band blew up, and she can swing from a clean melody to a full throat-tearing scream inside the same bar. These are not session vocalists pulled off a stock library. These are headliners.

Grabbitz is the connective tissue. He is an electronic producer who has been drifting toward heavier, guitar-driven material for years, which makes him exactly the right name to keep a crossover like this from clanging. Put those three in a room and you do not get a safe track. You get something built for a drop that makes an arena lose its mind.

And look, Riot has form here. Their event anthems have ranged from genuinely great to background noise you forget by the quarterfinals. This one is a swing. A big one. The reveal is barely a day old, so the discourse cycle is only just spinning up, and the takes are already ugly in both directions.

Why This Matters More Than a Song Usually Would

The anthem is not decoration. It is the sonic identity of the entire event. Every hype package, every walkout, every highlight reel, every social clip that leaks out of the arena rides on that track. You will hear it more times than you hear most of the casters, and by the playoffs it either gives you chills or it makes you reach for the mute button.

The thing is, Riot's music operation is a genuine competitive advantage and other publishers still have not figured that out. Most events license something generic, slap it over a montage and move on. Riot builds tracks that outlive the tournament they were made for. People still have old anthems in their gym playlists years later, which is a level of brand stickiness you cannot buy with banner ads.

The heavier direction also says something loud about who Riot thinks is watching. This is not a game with a soft, casual audience. The playerbase is young, extremely online, and metalcore is genuinely massive with that exact demographic right now. Picking two vocalists from that world is Riot reading the room instead of guessing at it.

And the stakes are real, right? If it hits, it becomes the sound people associate with the whole event forever. If it flops, it gets skipped in every VOD and nobody mentions it again after week one. There is no comfortable middle ground with anthems. They either become the thing or they become nothing.

Real Talk: What This Has to Do With Your Ranked

Here is where it gets interesting for you specifically. Every single big event, ranked queues fill up with players who just watched a two-minute highlight reel and decided they are now an entry fragger. They swing every angle, they burn their whole kit in the first fifteen seconds, and they end the night 3 and 14 wondering why the pro version worked. Hype is not a strategy.

What actually transfers from pro play is boring, and that is precisely why almost nobody copies it. Crosshair sitting at head level on every single approach. Pre-aiming the two angles that actually get held on that site instead of wide-swinging into three players. One utility piece thrown on purpose per round rather than four thrown in panic. Watch the first ten seconds of a pro round, not the ace clip. That opening setup is the part you can steal.

The other half is mental, and that is where most climbs die. You do not lose elo because your aim collapsed, you lose it because you queued the fifth game in a row while still tilted from the third. Music is genuinely a decent reset between games, and yes, a heavy anthem does the job. But you cannot buy pro game sense, and you definitely cannot buy teammates who hold their flank. If solo queue is the thing breaking you rather than your mechanics, the Val rank boost exists for exactly that reason.

Last one, and it is free. One person calls. Not five. The single biggest gap between a decent lobby and a good one is that in the good one somebody says a plan out loud before the round starts and everyone shuts up and runs it. Add basic economy discipline on top and you will climb without touching your sensitivity once.

The Verdict

My take, and I will defend it: this anthem is going to be more memorable than half the group stage. Group stages at events this size are frequently lopsided, full of maps that are decided by the twelfth round and rosters that came a long way to lose two series and fly home.

Nobody is rewatching a 13 to 4 map in six months. But people absolutely will still be playing the walkout track. That is not me being cynical about competition, it is just how live events work. The atmosphere is the product as much as the scoreline is, and the atmosphere is built out of sound.

I know the counterargument. It is just marketing, it is a publisher renting credibility from musicians who have never touched a ranked game. Sure. But for an esport, the marketing IS a big part of the product. You are selling a spectacle. A spectacle with a weak soundtrack is a LAN with good lighting.

And honestly, if you are calling a metalcore anthem cringe today, I am willing to bet you said the same thing about the last two and both of them are somewhere in your playlist right now. It happens every year. The cycle is undefeated.

Prediction: within two weeks that track is the default warmup music in half the lobbies you queue into, somebody edits it over a Champions highlight package before the event has even started, and the same people dunking on it today will be quoting the chorus in comms. Book it.