223 songs. Ouch. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Don’t expect huge walls of text for every song because most of them will be below 4/10. Also, don’t expect any specific thoughts regarding the semi-finals themselves because they’re just a straight stream of songs without any opening acts or breaks.

Portugal hype, as always. FdC is basically always good and I don’t expect this to change this time. Well, I know it won’t change because I’ve listened to the studio versions before. So let’s see how the lives change my opinions, shall we?

Despite the artist lineup all but saying who’s going to win even before we have the songs, I’m still quite excited about Melodifestivalen. It always gives me a chance to fall in love with songs that will certainly fail to even qualify for the final.

Will Denmark cook, or are they cooked? I hope it’s the former, but it could easily be the latter, too. I’m going to stay optimistic, though.

Unlike many other NFs this year, Dora has seen a glow-up compared to previous years, almost certainly thanks to Croatia’s best result ever last year and winning the televote. Let’s see if they can continue this momentum.

Stefan Raab is back in the saddld and he’s promising to make German national finals interesting. I hope he isn’t lying and Germany can come up with a winner.

Sadly, the Serbian NF is considerably weaker than it usually is, but for understandable reasons. Still, let’s see what they have for us in store.

This year, the format of the Icelandic NF is different. Instead of having a weird wildcard system and a superfinal, it’s a lot more straightforward now: two semi-finals, three qualifiers from each and a normal final. I wish more NFs abandoned superfinals as well.

Lithuania. Lots of songs. No time to talk. Let’s go.

For some random reason, Armenia is doing a national final. Well, not that I’m complaining, I happen to like national finals more than internal selections. Let’s see if Armenia will disappoint us or not.