Tienas (left) and ARB4. Photos: Courtesy of Riot Games
One of Mumbai hip-hop artist Tienas’ fiercest bars from the new community anthem “Gotcha Back” for the video game Valorant is: “If you mess with us, we gon’ put you on a t-shirt.”
Over a call with multinational producer-composer team ARB4’s Or Kribos and Itamar Carmel, Tienas aka Tanmay Saxena explains what he was going for. “It basically means that if you mess with us, we’re gonna send you up and your crew will make T-shirts for you in your memories,” he says as Kribos and Carmel burst into laughter.
Commissioned by Valorant’s publisher and developer Riot Games, the high-energy, fairly accessible hip-hop/electronic fusion (with a sample of Tamil percussive drum urumi) “Gotcha Back” follows ARB4’s and Tienas’ 2023 song “Raja.” While that one introduced the in-game Indian agent Harbor, “Gotcha Back” was part of the song series Valorant MV//MNT Artist Series Vol. 03.
Kribos says that the process for “Raja” – made with Los Angeles-based producer and flautist Mangal Suvarnan – was very different from “Gotcha Back,” in the way that the intent of both projects were wholly separate. With “Raja,” the producer recounts how ARB4 were just looking up top and emerging Indian rappers before they found Tienas. They linked via Instagram DMs and got started on a song that was meant to introduce the character Harbor. Kribos adds, “The difference this time was that this is the first ever Valorant community anthem that is dedicated for the players and the eSports teams. It’s celebrating the fans and lovers of the brand in India. So it really is a song for the gamers.” Carmel adds about how “Raja” allowed them to bring in the “Indian flair and culture in such an authentic way” and inspired them when the time came for a second collaboration that became “Gotcha Back.”
Tienas, for his part, says that “Raja” made the next collaboration work “very smoothly.” Blending Hindi and English lyrics on “Gotcha Back,” the intent was pretty clear for Tienas. “I’ve always been the kind of writer who always has a thought before writing the song. I always have a thought, an idea or a specific topic that I need to speak about. This was nothing different […] The song can inspire them to play hard and win together as a team and about having each other’s back, because that’s very hard in these types of games and in life as well, you know?” the hip-hop artist says.
It wasn’t a typical hip-hop beat that ARB4 served up either. Carmel says working on “Raja” had “sparked our curiosity about how we explore new sounds not really popular in hip-hop.” The producer adds, “We started just sorting samples from India, and then that urumi is sound was just the right one. That really connected all the dots together.”
Kribos adds that “Raja” – which had a sample of rabab – was the “blueprint for a cross-genre song” for ARB4, who had previously worked on Valorant songs “Karanlığın” and “Villain (Take The Shot)” in 2022 and went on to release “Re-ignition” in 2023. The composer-producer says that the idea behind “Raja” was to create a song that felt “very modern, but also did not negate the longstanding culture and incredible musical tradition of India.”
While ARB4 have made plenty more inroads into making music for games and the eSports community, Tienas too sees his two songs as a “great opportunity” to introduce his music to a new audience. “Without this space [of music in games], they [gamers] would never get a chance to know us. That’s the most important thing as an artist in this kind of industry,” he says. Kribos adds how working in video games is “profoundly meaningful as artists” for ARB4. He adds, “It’s not just, ‘Oh, I’m playing the game and the music really drives me.’ It’s the lifeblood of the game, or it’s what drives the game, but also feeling this familiarity or feeling represented.”
Outside of Valorant, however, there might be a collaboration in the works between ARB4 and Tienas, but Kribos says it’s among the projects that are “un-announceable at this point.” Tienas will release a new album this year and a deluxe edition of his 2019 debut album O. His other project Gunda will also “keep dropping songs” along the way.
Watch the video for “Raja” below.