How ‘Arcane’ Went Global for Its Big Season 2 Soundtrack

It’s official: Netflix’s League of Legends adaptation, Arcane, has come to an end. But just as with the intervening years between Seasons One and Two, fans can relive the series’ emotional highs and lows with its new soundtrack, composed entirely of original music inspired by the grounded fantasy world of Arcane.

With 22 new songs from a wide range of internationally renowned artists, the soundtrack for Season Two represents the next chapter in the ambitious musical journey that Riot Games began within the League of Legends universe. Fans of League of Legends esports know that the franchise is intrinsically tied to music, and wait anxiously for the reveal of the annual League of Legends World Championship anthem. Like the game that inspired it, Arcane has become a global hit, and that wide reach extends into the curation of its official soundtrack.

Featuring a diverse mix of artists, including Twenty One Pilots, Stray Kids, and Tom Morello, the album blends styles as varied as heavy metal, Latin pop, and sweeping orchestral sounds that feel pulled directly from the game’s universe.

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An album designed to resonate across cultures and genres, it pushes the boundaries of what a video game adaptation can achieve musically. 

While game adaptations have been met with more acclaim in recent years, Arcane has defied all expectations with its major mainstream appeal, and the integration of a globally diverse soundtrack adds a new layer of accessibility, bridging the gap between gaming culture and broader entertainment even further. 

Rolling Stone recently sat down with Riot Games’ Head of Music, Maria Egan, as well as multiple artists who contributed to the soundtrack, to delve into what makes the Arcane soundtrack the next great chapter in the musical legacy of League of Legends. 

Season 2’s soundtrack goes global

Riot Games’ animated adaptation of the League of Legends universe is famous for its ambitious visual style, but its music has been equally potent. Over the course of 18 episodes, the award-winning show features a wide-ranging lineup of over 30 artists, a mix of high-profile names and emerging stars with several chart-topping, global songs, like Imagine Dragons’ “Enemy.” 

In 2021, the first season’s album achieved over 5.6 billion streams across platforms, with some of its biggest hits like “Enemy” likely pulling in curious viewers who were otherwise unaware of the show. With warming songs, like Curtis Harding’s “Our Love,” high-energy beats like BONES UK’s “Dirty Little Animals,” and soul touching lyrics performed by Sting in “What Could Have Been,” Arcane’s first album had something for everyone in its diverse audience.  

Building off that established success, the second season’s soundtrack showcases Riot’s deeper focus on global artists, expanding its reach into a wider variety of musical subgenres and regional sounds.

Featuring artists like Marcus King, Ashnikko, and Linkin Park members Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong — who also provided the official anthem of this year’s League of Legends World Finals — the Season Two album has garnered over 400 million streams since its release. The soundtrack secured the number 2 spot on Spotify’s Global Top Album Charts, with the song “Ma Meilleure Ennemie,” by Stromae and Pomme, claiming the fourth spot on the Global songs chart.

Egan says the team at Riot is very proud of the streaming success of Arcane’s music, but it wasn’t an easy journey. The process of curating the soundtrack involved a meticulous selection that excluded many artists passionate about the show. “There are many songs for many artists that didn’t make the final cut,” Egan says, “[they] just didn’t work for whatever reason.” 

“We could do a whole other superstar soundtrack just from the things that didn’t work. But what we were guided by, ultimately, was storytelling. What songs told the stories the best, whether that was an emerging artist or whether that was an established superstar — the song had to do the sort of emotional work that it needed to do for the show, and that was the number one factor.”

She highlighted how the success of the show’s first season inspired many artists to reach out, eager to contribute, including Twenty One Pilots and Stromae. However, the curation process remained selective, ensuring every track served the narrative’s emotional weight while having room to experiment with new languages and sounds.

‘Musicians are dying to do things like this’

Projects that seamlessly blend diverse musical genres with immersive world-building are a rarity in the entertainment industry, so it’s not unusual for Arcane to have captured the attention of artists worldwide. For many artists working on such a project represents a unique opportunity to freely create a track that has a deeper level of integration with the storytelling of media, which is not often found in typical productions.  

Agnete Kjølsrud and Erlend Gjerde, the singer and drummer of Djerv, a Norwegian band blending metal and alternative rock, are uniquely positioned to speak on Riot’s approach to musical collaborations, as Djerv’s first song with the company, “Get Jinxed,” was pivotal in kickstarting Riot’s ventures beyond video games. It was the first track with lyrics paired with a music video that the company created for the release of the video game character Jinx. Its success paved the way for Arcane. 

Over a decade later, Djerv returned to the League universe with “Rebel Heart,” a song inspired by Jinx’s narrative arc in the show.

“Riot is different now, of course,” says Gjerde, “they’re a multimedia, multicultural company, but them having their own recording company, working with professional labels, distributors, publishing companies, and having a designated music team, that is something that most gaming companies don’t have yet.”

According to the singer, Riot has evolved its music production into a more integrated and ongoing part of its creative process, distinguishing itself from other companies that typically use more fragmented approaches. Unlike the majority of video game companies who occasionally tapped artists for a one-off cover version of a popular song, Riot has established an entire division focused on developing soundtracks that blend seamlessly with the storytelling of its games and shows. 

Alex ‘Mako’ Seaver, who serves at the album’s Executive Music Producer and has been working with Riot on League-related music projects as early as in 2016, also highlighted how rare it is for artists to find projects that “allow music to occupy this much space” in a show. 

“I think musicians are dying to do things like this,” Mako says, “I think it’s possible for many versions of Arcane-kinds of musical storytelling to exist. And it’s such a treat that it does exist here for people to see, and just the fact that we have 20 songs with artists from all over the world, crushing their in-show moment is a good example of just how hungry and ready everybody is to do something like this.”

After working on the soundtrack of the show’s first season as a producer and artist, Mako returned for the second with the song “What Have They Done To Us,” which also features Grey, an electronic music duo consisting of brothers Kyle and Michael Trewartha. But reflecting on the experimental and pioneering nature of the show’s approach to music, Mako mentions another song in Arcane’s soundtrack, “To Ashes and Blood,” performed by Woodkid (real name Yoann Lemoine).

The French artist is only one of two returning from Season One’s soundtrack, which is one of the reasons the music team pushed beyond their comfort zones with “To Ashes and Blood.” While Arcane doesn’t shy away from using multiple languages in its songs, Woodkid’s track is the only one that features a fictional tongue — something that, according to Mako, could have been a “big old swing and miss.” 

Looking back on Season One’s music, Mako draws a distinction between how much more ambitiously weird Season Two became. “We were trying something very strange with the music, we were inventing a new language and using children’s choirs and making something that wasn’t ‘Guns For Hire’,” Mako says. “I don’t think [Riot] had established any version of a language for Shurima yet, so we got to invent it together. And not only did we invent it, we needed small children to be able to pronounce these words. And so we worked with a wonderful kids choir out here in Los Angeles, and it was just like as this thing evolved, we’re like, ‘holy cow, this is one of the more complicated things we’ve ever done.’”

Although time consuming and somewhat risky, the approach of creating a new language presented the opportunity for artists to not just evoke the feeling of the show’s world in its music, but add something tangible to its overall lore and world-building.

‘Synchronicity between music and image’

In traditional media projects, the integration of music typically follows a linear process. Music is often composed, recorded, or licensed during post-production, after the visuals are nearly or entirely complete, often requiring precise synchronization of the tracks to the finished scenes to align musical cues to narrative moments. 

Conversely, Riot’s approach for the second season of Arcane involves a more dynamic process. The creative team collaborates with musicians, animators, and writers from the very beginning allowing music to influence the visual storytelling and vice versa. “I think the first time was different because the song was already existing and I was just here to sing it and produce it, but this time we built it from scratch,” Woodkid says referring to the process of synchronizing music and visuals for “To Ashes and Blood” over the past two years.

This “ping-pong” dialogue, as Woodkid describes it, is rare in entertainment outside of major feature films. As a multidisciplinary artist — renowned as a music video director for artists like Taylor Swift and Harry Styles — Woodkid brings a unique perspective to such collaborations. His experience bridges the gap between music and visuals, highlighting how this iterative process fosters a deeper synergy between the two mediums. This methodology, exemplified in Arcane, resulted in an immersive audio-visual experience that was both organic and compelling for the audience, with sequences fitting the beat of the song rather than vice versa.

“Being involved so early in the process is something that only leads to great choreography and great contrast in motion and synchronicity between music and image,” Woodkid says. “I’m not sure I can think of a lot of artistic pieces that have such an amazing roster of artists that create original songs for it. It’s pretty unlikely only massive feature films do it, so I think that’s what makes [Arcane] very unique. And I think really the way we’ve built it is something I’ve never done before.” 

But even with a continuing communicative process there were missteps, such as with “Paint the Town Blue” by Ashnikko (real name Ashton Nicole Casey) in the fourth episode of the second season. An unmixed version was used where her voice sounded affected by a cold, leaving room for debate over whether it was a mistake or a bold stylistic decision. Yet, all things considered, most of the artists look back fondly on the overall experience.

D4vd (real name David Anthony Burke), an emerging American singer-songwriter known for his introspective writing style, mirrors Woodkid’s sentiments about the level of creative freedom on the project, calling it “empowering for filmmakers, directors, and animators.” D4vd also mentions how the collaborative process between the music team and the artist, and the animated team at Fortiche, helped “lined up perfectly” the emotions needed to be conveyed through the music with those on screen. 

“I see a lot of comments on TikTok and social media on how [the song] fits perfectly with the scene and how it’s destroying [the fans] emotionally because it just matches so well with what’s on screen,” d4vd says. As a League of Legends player, he was already familiar with Arcane, and his connection to the game played a part when writing the second season’s key track, “Remember Me,” but it was the characters and storytelling that ultimately captivated him.

D4vd commends the range of emotion and different sounds captured in the soundtrack of Season Two, emphasizing how Arcane is breaking boundaries in the way stories are told through music. He sees the show’s success as a catalyst for challenging traditional collaboration methods, inspiring others to embrace new creative possibilities.

‘Beyond just lyrics and melodies’

Modern music increasingly defies traditional boundaries, blending languages, genres, and cultural influences into innovative collaborations, with artists and audiences embracing multilingual and cross-cultural works more and more. Arcane’s soundtrack exemplifies this trend, showcasing how to leverage music to bridge cultural and linguistic divides. 

Among the standout contributors to the second season’s album is Stray Kids, a chart-topping K-pop group, who collaborated with guitarist Tom Morello and Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko on the dynamic track “Come Play.” While acknowledging the significance of these international collaborations, the group highlighted how the music industry will continue to grow to “become bolder through these various exchanges between music cultures and genres.”

The group is currently in the middle of a world tour, where each stop sees thousands of fans swarming arenas voraciously. This immense support highlights how multilingual songs and immersive performances can break down barriers, demonstrating how music can transcend language and resonate universally. 

“Nowadays, listeners are consuming and connecting with music through sources beyond just lyrics and melodies,” the group says in a shared statement. “That’s why we continuously try to present something new to our fans. It’s also the reason why we learn new languages, or at least always try to provide translations, because we want to reach out to all our international fans out there and help them connect with our music more.”

Arcane’s success in incorporating multiple languages reflects the growing willingness of listeners to embrace music beyond their linguistic comfort zones, showing how modern artists can connect with more global audiences. As Stray Kids notes, this openness to multilingual content will only encourage artists to experiment more boldly with their work and seek collaborations that will familiarize new audiences to their music.

This trend of cross-cultural and genre-blending has piqued the interest of artists from all backgrounds, including those with long-established careers in the music industry like Tom Morello. Known for his work with Rage Against the Machine, Audioslave, and as a solo artist, Morello is no stranger to making waves in the music industry by working on groundbreaking and genre-expanding projects.

“It’s funny because when it was announced that I was doing the song for Arcane with Stray Kids, I started hearing from some of my friends whose kids were going bananas over what they were hearing about it,” he says, “and they were finding sort of an interest in my music that they might not have had before. This is one of the great advantages of participating in something like this. I am a real advocate of letting the world know that the electric guitar has a very strong future and not just a strong nostalgic path, and a place like the Arcane soundtrack is a place to prove that.”

‘A boldly curated soundtrack’

Riot Games’ music team approached the creation of Arcane’s soundtrack by carefully blending an array of global artists, balancing different genres while ensuring thematic consistency. The approach went beyond simply featuring well-known artists: it was about maintaining a cohesive listening experience, an album that Morello described as a “a boldly curated soundtrack” that has a “sonic unity” to it.

“That’s not easy to do, and this is not just like some scores or superhero movies or whatever where it’s just like a grab bag of ridiculous stuff that feels more like it’s put together in a corporate boardroom than with much thought to artistry,” Morello says. “That is not the case with Arcane, where every element of this show is treated with great care, and I think the music very much reflects that. [Riot] knows they’ve got something very special in this show, in this story, and they want the music to be just as special, and I respect that.”

According to Riot’s Global Head of Music, it was “very easy” to get everybody on board for a collaboration between Stray Kids, Young Miko, and Tom Morello for one of Arcane’s songs. 

Riot and the K-pop group were exploring collaboration opportunities for quite some time, and during this process, Morello developed a track that was “perfect for a high-energy scene [Riot] had in mind.” Young Miko was the additional “extraordinary talent” needed for this, with Egan noting that the Puerto Rican artist is “in many ways” one of the biggest artists on the soundtrack because of her fans.

“Not having everything in English was a big creative decision,” Egan explains, citing how the League community, Arcane’s audience, is not restricted by languages and are excited to both “discover something fresh” and hear their favorite band’s familiar sound. This global approach has created a soundtrack where everyone, from “heavy metal fans to K-pop fans,” can find a connection with the show.

While such partnerships are not new to the media landscape, Arcane serves as a particularly effective example of how these collaborations can be maximized to foster a dynamic and engaging storytelling experience. 

This model of integrating global artists collaborations — that feature different languages and genres — with a creative process where music and animation are developed in tandem, offers a unique approach that deepens audience engagement with the show, and could inform how future cross-media endeavors are approached moving forward.

From Rolling Stone US.