Blizzard releases the Undermine(d) official soundtrack, so now you can listen to smooth goblin jazz whenever you like

The World of Warcraft team has undoubtedly turned the dial to eleven when it has come to designing the city of Undermine for patch 11.1. The Goblins, with their strong New Jersey-esque accents and focus on mercantilism over all, have always been unique among Azeroth’s various sentients — so naturally, it’s always made sense that their capital city would be unusual as well. While we’ve had peeks at Goblin life on the surface of Kezan in their starting area or in various dungeons, the music has always tended towards being sort of wacky. Therefore it caught a lot of players off-guard — in a very, very good way for most — when the soundtrack to Undermine(d) turned out to be entirely new and unusual: jazz, and a lot of it.

This kind of music, which gives off the greasy glitz and glam vibe you might expect from a real-world movie about Las Vegas or mafiosos, is something we haven’t had in WoW before, and as it’s been a big part of the patch experience so far (both inside and outside of the raid!) it came as a delight when Blizzard posted a 26-minute soundtrack video on YouTube: The Smooth Goblin Jazz of Undermine(d).

You can also listen to the soundtrack on Spotify and Apple Music.

This video gives you a great taste of the variety of music you can expect to hear tooling around Undermine. The general city themes like “Hard Times in Undermine” are here, as well as the more specific tracks like the ones you hear associated with each of the cartels; for example, flipping to 11:50 will bring you to “Blackwater Ballyhoo,” the Blackwater Cartel theme, which blends nautical and pirate motifs familiar from elsewhere in the game with a jazzy twist. I’m also especially fond of the track at 5:53, “Mixin’ it Up, Burnin’ it Down,” which is the fight music for most of the raid bosses in The Liberation of Undermine.

if I could make one suggestion about the YouTube version of the sounttrack, it’d be this: timestamps, Blizzard, please! It’s hard to find or link to a specific track in this video without slowly skimming back and forth across the timeline, and sometimes you’re just in the mood to hear Gallywix’s battle music, “Shine and Rust” — one of the first tracks that showed up in datamining for this patch, which clued us in that we were in for something unusual. Fortunately, Spotify and Apple Music both separate the Undermine soundtrack into distinct tracks.

On a personal level, as an appreciator of Blizzard’s music in most settings, this has been a phenomenal soundtrack. It would have been so easy to just go with an expansion of the usual Goblin-y themes heard in Kezan and The MOTHERLODE and called it a day, or the usual “orchestral strings and ominous chanting” for the raid, but it wouldn’t have been quite right — and given the soul shown in this soundtrack by the composers of Undermine(d)‘s soundtrack, it’s clear they felt the same way.