Chandra – “Nessun Dorma (We Will Win!)”

Taking on Puccini is a bold move. Most bands wouldn’t go near it. Chandra not only went near it, they broke the whole aria into three acts and packed it under three minutes. It shouldn’t work as well as it does.

The song dropped to coincide with the FIFA World Cup 2026, and the timing makes sense the moment you hear it. Frontman Chandra Nair has said it came to him nearly complete after hearing the original at the Winter Olympics 2026 closing ceremony, and you can believe it. There’s a decisiveness to the recording. This doesn’t feel like a track that got endlessly second-guessed.

The three-act structure tracks the actual emotional experience of following your team in a big tournament; the sleepless dread before a match, the crushing familiarity of it going wrong, and then the irrational, stubborn belief that next time you’ll get there, and producer Elliot Vaughan, who has worked with Chandra across several previous releases, holds the orchestral elements in check long enough for the closing section to actually mean something when it opens up. It earns the explosion rather than just announcing one.

“We’ll win again” has been rattling around my head since the first listen and I suspect it’ll stay there all summer. Go dig into the back catalog too, and follow the band on whatever platform you use.