I’m watching a recording as I’d missed this during the first Super Saturday (I was watching Latvia’s Supernova instead), but let’s check this out. Sadly, I already know the outcome, so I won’t be wondering about who’s going to win.
Greece is staging a proper NF for the first time since 2015 (2017 was a song selection for Demy) and I’m a little excited. There are some good songs in the mix. I hope whatever they end up sending will be worthy of representing Greece (luckily, there’s just one Melfest reject in the mix, so we almost won).
Welcome to the second edition of the Luxembourg Song Contest. It seems like it’s here to stay, even if some things about it are somewhat iffy (please stop replacing your artists’ songs with Melfest rejects, it sucks). Last year, it had exceptional production values, so let’s see if it holds up this time.
As always, TRM put all submissions they got into the audition round (as long as they met the length requirement, having vocals and basic stuff like that). Luckily, I’m a little bit pickier, so I’m only going to review 27 entries out of the 29 that will be performed. If you want, go ahead and look up the other two on your own.
It’s time for the second wildcard round of the season (and, hopefully, the last wildcard round of the season). Originally, there were going to be 11 candidates in this round, but one of them (Teslenko) withdrew in favour of San Marino. So now we’re left with just 10. Let’s see if there’s any quality here.
This year, Estonia released 152 entries out of 175 total submitted ones (15 direct finalists, 20 wildcards and 137 rejected submissions - even though some of them got removed later, the internet still remembers). In a way, I think it could be a fun project to review literally all of them, so here I go, listening to a lot of bad songs. This post will be specifially about the wildcard round.
Hello and welcome to one of two national finals that weren’t actually national finals at first. Coincidentally, both of them still feature a live orchestra. Yes, it’s Albania time.
Yes, it’s finally time to do a review of 2011. I was putting this off for long enough, but I finally have to sit down and review these, oh god, 43 songs. A quick rundown of the contest: hosted in Düsseldorf by Stefan Raab and two other people (Anke Engelke and Judith Rakers), nobody withdrew, while Austria, Hungary, Italy and San Marino all returned after realising that Western European countries weren’t, in fact, at a disadvantage as long as they sent good songs. No more waffling from me, let’s go.
Welcome to the first out of many national final posts this year. I’ll try to cover all proper NFs (i.e. no X-Factor-style artist selections - looking at you, Israel and maybe Georgia).
However, I have to ask: why did they call this “Montesong 2024” when it’s for Eurovision 2025? That makes it needlessly confusing. Czechia called their NF “ESCZ Year” where “Year” was the ESC edition it was for, so we had ESCZ 2024 in December 2023. But I digress. Welcome back, Montenegro. I hope you’re here to stay.
Welcome to Oslo, to an arena NRK booked even before the 2009 final was held since they were so sure of winning. Due to being in Norway (expensive), four whole countries dropped out of the contest (granted, most of them also had no success). The countries we lost were Andorra (who never managed to qualify and decided to leave forever), Czechia (who never managed to qualify and decided to leave for a while), Montenegro (who never managed to qualify and decided to leave for a bit), as well as Hungary who actually have qualified before, but didn’t have money to keep participating consistently (so they had to rethink their approach). But hey, Georgia was back, so that’s something! And Ukraine managed to not get disqualified, even though they almost nearly were, so that’s good! All in all, 39 countries participated. But will we get stuck with 39 awful songs like in 2008, or will we continue the trend of having actually good songs like in 2009? I already know the answer, but I won’t say it upfront.