Sabrina Imbler: I’m so delighted to convene today to talk about one of the most European events of the year: the Eurovision Song Contest. It is a hallowed occasion, where a smattering of European countries (and some oddballs, like Australia) gather to sing some of the most European songs you’ve ever heard. Some are very good, many are mediocre, and some are memorably strange.
This year’s contest has been relatively free of controversy, especially compared to last year’s contest, where fan favorite “Europapa” by Joost (The Netherlands) was unexpectedly disqualified after the semifinals, and crowds of people outside the arena protested Israel’s participation in the contest. We’ll get to the countries, the songs, and the controversies soon, but first I wanted to ask all of the experts on this panel, what is your relationship to the Eurovision Song Contest? Longtime fan or first-time watcher?
Ray Ratto: I didn’t know about this going in, so I am extra-jazzed for the possibility of fraud. That said, my experience with Eurovision is exactly and totally this. I was disappointed to learn that nothing rose to those heights, or depths, but I also am disappointed that the Vatican didn’t seize on the fascination of the new Pope to throw in an entry (one of Leo’s spare bishops singing Chicago blues, who says no?). But I enter with an open mind and a vow not to slag it based on my own biases. I’m trying to think like the three of you, so I am prepared for the ensuing lawsuits.
Dan McQuade: The first year I can remember watching Eurovision is 2006, when a Finnish costumed hard rock group named Lordi won the contest with a song titled “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” I think the video of their semifinal performance went around on social media and encouraged me to tune in (probably via a bootleg stream). My wife and I have been watching it regularly since 2017, when it was on Logo and Michelle Visage and Ross Matthews did commentary. That year had one of our favorite songs: “Yodel It” by Ilinca and Alex Florea (Romania). It was everything that I love about Eurovision: A little bit Eurodance, a little bit talk-rap, and some complete nonsense: Romania, a country without much of a tradition of yodeling, did a song about yodeling.
Ray: And yet Romania didn’t even enter this year, part of a general anti-Balkan bias that I just made up. I was jacked for seeing what North Macedonia was going to offer up—some brooding ballad, no doubt.
Dan: After Eurovision 2017 Romania does have a tradition of yodeling, so they should’ve just entered Ilinca again.
Kelsey McKinney: I loved watching the yodeling video you shared, Dan. And I am excited to learn from your expertise. I’m thrilled to be discussing Eurovision with all of you! I have been a passive consumer of Eurovision for the last 10 years. Usually, I learn about Eurovision after it has already happened, though, and watch clips on YouTube. So this is my first year actually watching Eurovision live! So far ... I love it!
Sabrina: As a lifelong ABBA fan, I have always been an ambient Eurovision appreciator. But I only really got into watching the contest during the pandemic, thanks in part to the movie Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, in which Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams play laughably bad, last-minute entrants from Iceland. Apparently lots of people hate this movie, but I love it so much and watch it every year, partially for Dan Stevens playing a flamboyant, closeted Russian. And Rachel McAdams’s final song, which always brings a tear to my eye! Ever since then I have tuned in. While some people dream of one day getting married, I dream of watching Eurovision in real life.
Kelsey: Sometimes I think about how one of the true losses for American’s interest in Eurovision is the pandemic. Because Netflix had both the rights to stream Eurovision in America in 2020 and that Will Ferrell/Rachel McAdams original movie to release right before it aired. I was so locked in on that. I loved the movie and I love the songs. Sometimes I sing them to myself still, years later! I’m planning to watch it on Saturday after the finals.
Sabrina: That’s so true, Kelsey. And Iceland’s entry that year, Daði Freyr’s green-jumpsuited “Think About Things,” was genuinely good! I feel Iceland winning Eurovision the same year the movie came out would be one of the most powerful international events in recorded history, and we are all worse for missing it.
What did everyone think about this year’s semifinals? I’d love to hear about the experience of watching Eurovision, as it really is an event.
Ray: I had no idea what to expect, so I was willing to let Hazel Brugger and Sandra Studer, the hosts, guide me through day one, even though Hazel looked like she’d rather be trapped in a mine than do the gig. Especially day two, when she was given a dress made up entirely of CDs that looked like it might have been lined with spikes.
Sabrina: I absolutely loved that outfit because Hazel looked just like this deep-sea scale worm that I know that is named after the geobiologist Victoria J. Orphan. (Orphan’s wife, the biologist Shana Goffredi, also has a scale worm named after her.)
Kelsey: Oh my god. That’s her!!!!!
Dan: Hazel and Sandra ruled, with or without the connection to deep-sea scale worms named after geobiologist Victoria J. Orphan. They somehow both had a detached disdain for the competition and also treated it as if it were a World War. I had to turn away on night two when Hazel was feeding fondue to the Finland contingent, though. Eurovision doesn’t allow profanity or nudity but they allowed that? It was possibly the grossest thing I’d ever seen on TV.
Kelsey: I also love Hazel and Sandra. I like how they keep doing the jokes that are clearly written for them, pausing for laughter, and getting absolutely nothing from the audience or the contestants. Bombing on international television! What icons!
Sabrina: I really enjoyed their song, “Made in Switzerland,” which was essentially a singalong list of various things that were allegedly invented in Switzerland. I was thoroughly impressed and do not want to fact-check that list. Switzerland, the land of inventions!
Dan: My wife checked Eurovision Reddit and found a factchecking chart. Let’s just say that, yes, LSD was invented in Switzerland.
Ray: I didn’t see it until later because once H&S started telling us that everyone on Earth was eligible to vote for the sixth time, I thought the entertainment was done. When I caught up to it, I thought it was better than about two-thirds of the actual entrants, if insufficiently quirky. What I couldn’t figure out is how every country with an entry got people in the front row with flags and signs. How long was this railing? A thousand meters? Even allowing for the magic of video, the thing paced so fast that it felt like a NASCAR race in the rain.
Kelsey: Did anyone here vote? I did not.
Dan: I didn’t know we had the ability to vote.
Sabrina: No, because you have to pay to vote from the U.S. Frankly, I don’t think I should have a vote as an American. The one situation where I support voter disenfranchisement!
Ray: Voting felt like cheating the process, so (a) I agree with Sabrina and (b) think Americans should be kept out of the process as much as possible. If Andorra’s not in, we shouldn’t be either.
Kelsey: Before we get into the individual contestants and our favorites, there is something strange I would like to note, which is that the two semifinals nights had a very strange gender segregation to me! I watched the first night and was like “Wow no women in Eurovision this year! That sucks!” but then on night two almost all the contestants were not men!!! Why! Who did this planning?
Sabrina: That was so confusing to me, and honestly I think did the contestants a disservice. Semifinals 1 was the Night of a Thousand Twinks and then Semifinals 2 was the Night of Eastern European Power Ballad Divas. I know the producers set the order of the semifinals but I don’t know how they split them between the nights.
Ray: Again, I had no idea how the logistics work, so nothing surprised me while everything surprised me. When the Slovenian entry “How Much Time Do We Have Left?” ended, I almost felt the same way. But I always feel that way about acts that hang the singer upside down.
Sabrina: Ray, that’s the perfect segue into my next question for everyone. What were the highlights of the songs that didn’t make it into the finals? That Slovenian song was clearly very heartfelt but was the worst of the batch for me, even, or especially, when he was hanging upside-down.
Kelsey: The only song I would like to discuss that did not make the finals (for new watchers of Eurovision: each semifinal has 15-16 contestants and 10 of them make the finals, so really not that many songs are cut) is the Australian entry, which was ostensibly about milkshakes, but actually I think about cum. I did not think the song was very good, but it was VERY campy in a way that I feel like Eurovision historically rewards, but did not reward this time. Maybe because it was Australia.
Dan: Kelsey, I don’t think you need to say “I think.” The stage was literally covered in cum—well, virtual cum. My wife, whose commentary I will continue to steal, said to me during this act: “It’s great when the novelty act is hot.” If only he didn’t have such an unfortunate mustache.
Sabrina: I’m not opposed to a semen-celebrating song but "Milkshake Man" felt, to me, like a song for babies that was about cum, which I didn’t like. Eurovision songs often have very simple or nonsense English lyrics so that people who speak different languages can sing along, but this vibe did not pair well with me for the cum man. Here the universal language was not English, but cum.
Ray: Anyone who can sing about cum and still wedge in a reference to “Lactose-free” while standing in front of a giant blender deserves more than a first round and out. Then again, it is a song that would largely convince me to kick the knob off my radio in rage if radios still had knobs.
For me, Ireland’s entry “Laika Party” was easily the weirdest song of either night and as such deserved a far better fate. The whole homage to a dog shot into space 70 years ago was bizarre enough, but then the dozens of marching dogs gave off a Stalinist-era parade in a hell-kennel vibe that made me say, “Yeah, this is the chicken song I remember from Big Fat Quiz.” “LAIKA PARTY IN THE SKY” makes the least sense of any sentence uttered in the competition, and that includes the mopey Italian Lucio Corsi’s evocative “a gold medal in spitting.” Honorable mention to Cyprus’s Theo Evan for a completely preposterous reliance on scaffolding to distract us from a song entitled “Shhh.”
Dan: My notes say I wanted Ireland to advance, but I always want Ireland to advance. “Laika Party” was great, though. I always love when a Eurovision entry sounds like it could’ve come out in 1992. All it was missing was a rap at the end.
Sabrina: I admit I was partial to “Poison Cake” by Marko Bošnjak (Croatia), which felt vaguely reminiscent of my 2023 favorite, Käärijä’s “Cha Cha Cha” from Finland. Here was another flamboyant man scream-singing to me about a delicious treat—no cum present here. To be fair, “Cha Cha Cha” told a relatable story about drinking a piña colada after a long week and losing oneself on the dance floor. The story of “Poison Cake,” I think, was about a cake that was poison.
Kelsey: Yeah, looking at the list of songs that did not qualify, “Poison Cake” is the only one I remember jamming to, but I have no idea what it looked like on stage, which is a huge part of the competition. One of the most interesting things to me about the judging in Eurovision and the way Europeans seem to talk about it online is that the staging really matters. People want to be entertained! And mainly, it seems, they want to be entertained at home, since many of these acts look beautiful on the television, and I’m sure look insane on the actual stage because there must be three guys with steady-cams running around in front of the performers. For example, if you watch this video from the arena of the German entry, you will see that for a full minute people in the actual arena cannot see the performer at all. Bye girl!
Dan: This is already 2,300 words, so we should probably get to the actual entries that qualified.
Sabrina: Thank you for keeping us on track, Dan.
Dan: Thanks, Sabrina! No one’s ever said that to me before.
Sabrina: What I’d love to hear from all of you—what was your favorite song? Mine was, by a long shot, "Bur Man Laimi” by Tautumeitas (Latvia). Where to begin with this perfect song! It was a haunting chorus of six women who looked like the offspring of Caroline Polachek and an axolotl. They emerged from a curtain of fringe and sang in perfect unison about hexing you. Their wet hair was coiled all the way down their nude bodysuits. It was maybe the most memorable song I’ve ever seen on the Eurovision stage.
Kelsey: Oh my god! I was also going to pick Latvia!! They were so spooky. They had irises painted on their eyelids so it looked like they were always awake. Their arms moved very strangely and were mesmerizing. They had choreography that looked easy, which means it must in fact be very complicated. And more importantly, for me at least, it really stood out! There were many entries that all felt very similar to me, and I really have to hand it to both Latvia and Estonia for creating memorable performances that didn’t feel derivative.
Dan: Unfortunately my favorite acts were basically novelty songs. I loved KAJ’s “Bara Bada Bastu” (Sweden), which was about enjoying a sauna. And I loved the guy from Estonia making fun of the Italians, especially after hearing that some Italians were furious. This is the second straight year I’ve loved Estonia’s entry. Last year’s entry was “(Nendest) narkootikumidest ei tea me (küll) midagi” by 5MIINUST x Puuluup, which roughly translates as “We (really) know nothing about (these) drugs.”
Sabrina: There’s nothing wrong with a novelty song! I too loved “Espresso Macchiato” by Tommy Cash (Estonia) and his captivating, spaghetti-like dance. And for what it’s worth, that’s the only song I’ve been singing this week—my apologies to all Italians!! Your culture is not a joke to me. But I loved it when the CGI airplane was doing the stupid Espresso Macchiato dance! And I thought the planted “fan” was a very good bit. Also Dan, one of my favorite all-time Eurovision songs is another song in Italian from Estonia—Elina Nechayeva’s pop opera ballad “La Forza.” I feel like Estonia often punches above its weight, population-wise.
Kelsey: OK, Sweden’s entry, I thought I really didn’t like when I first saw it but then during the replays for voting I was like wait ... is this a banger? “Espresso Macchiato” I loved immediately because it’s insane! Really important entry in the “Can you do racism against Italians?” genre. It’s so funny that the two most Italian songs (“Espresso Macchiato” from Estonia and “Tutta l’Italia” from San Marino) were both not from Italy.
Dan: I also liked Malta’s entry, “Serving” by Miriana Conte, but mainly because my yoga teacher Jill clued me in on some drama. It’s actually called “Kant”, but Eurovision made her censor it. So instead of her chorus being “Serving Cunt," it’s just “Serving [silence].” It sounds like a 1990s radio edit.
Kelsey: No! “Kant” is Maltese for “singing.” But it is pronounced “cunt,” which is hysterical. So the chorus is like “do-re-mi-fa-so-so-serving kant!” which is technically “serving singing,” but COME ON.
Ray: Latvia was clearly the coolest, just for the harmonies, though I would have preferred the subtitles to be more helpful than “Singing in a global language.” You cheap half-arseing bastards! Hire some interpreters who can type! It’s hard to not like anything sung in Portuguese, as it is four of the nine best languages on Earth. But Sweden was a yes (the concertina is back), and San Marino’s Gabry Ponte singing an ode to another country (“Tutta L’Italia”) is everything hilarious about Europe in general and especially the countries that can welcome you and thank you as you leave on the same road sign.
Malta escaped me as entertainment because it sounded to my coal-stuffed ears like every irritating American song of the last 20 years (and I didn’t know the cunt/not cunt backstory because I didn’t know there would be homework before the show started), but Erika Vikman (Finland), who finished “Ich Komme” and then didn’t thank Europe or profess her love for everyone in the hall was a properly rebel move. And Estonia deserved to advance just because of the name “Tommy Cash.” On the other hand, JJ, the Austrian entrant, irritated me because he sounded like he wanted to channel Minnie Riperton, who remains the only person I believe should ever be allowed to sing in that high a register.
Sabrina: Ray, totally. I feel like every year Portugal enters an extremely pleasant and real song to the contest, and it is hard for a song that you’d want to casually listen to at a dinner party have to compete with chanting Swedish sauna boys shooting fire. In my opinion, there was too much reliance on pyrotechnics this year. I love the occasional jet of flames, but at a certain point it feels like it’s there to hide a weak point of the song or a wavering high note.
Ray: I came away from this with one general rule of thumb: The more crap going on behind you, the poorer the entrant—with, again, exceptions for Emmy, the Irish entry, and Laura Thorn from Luxembourg, who went all in on the Barbie vibe with “Le Poupee Monte Le Son.” I think that’s how "Zjerm" by Shkodra Elektronike (Albania) got away with the weird malevolent uncle with the female singer.
Kelsey: Ray, I was also so annoyed with the captioning, because clearly some countries had captions they’d submitted ahead of time to be translated. Why not every country? I want to understand! Of all the blonde ballad women, I think I will root for “Hallucination” by Sissal (Denmark) in the final simply because it’s the first time in six years that Denmark has been to the final and I’m really happy for them. I want them to destroy France, who gets to jump right to the final by pay-to-play.
Sabrina: My next question … what song do you all think will win? (No gambling!)
Dan: I think the Sweden song is going to win. They have seven wins total—most ever, tied with Ireland—and their song is really catchy. Also I looked up the odds and they’re the favorite. (No, gambling!)
Kelsey: Oooh. Hard question. I really hope that Estonia wins because it would be so funny and because it would be fun for Eurovision to be in Estonia next year. But I think “Baller,” the German song, might win. When it was playing, I kept thinking “Europeans love shit like this!” which is kind of the game.
Sabrina: Kelsey, are you saying that Europeans love club dancing?
Kelsey: Yes. Which is also why I think San Marino will do well! Tutta L'Italia!!!
Dan: There’s some part of European music that’s been stuck in, like, 1995 for 30 years. Austria’s entry last year was “We Will Rave.” I love this kind of music, so I support this. “Baller” is actually kind of an updated version of a classic-sounding Eurodance song. It would be a worthy winner.
Sabrina: If Sweden wins, which seems likely, that will unfortunately be SO BORING. Sweden often sends very well-produced, polished songs to the contest and last won in 2023 with Loreen’s “Tattoo” (Loreen also won in 2012 for “Euphoria”). I do really like the big boys’ sauna song, but for sake of novelty I will be pulling for "Ich Komme,” by Finland’s Erika Vikman. It was my favorite of the power ballads and is, coincidentally, about coming. It’s a very catchy song and Vikman has great stage presence, especially when she’s riding a giant microphone dangling from the ceiling. It’s frankly refreshing when only one person is on stage in Eurovision because there is often just so much going on. I think if she can deliver another performance like the semifinals, she will have a shot.
Ray: I like Finland too because she is a proper belter, someone who could absolutely shatter both of Norway’s Kyle Alessandro’s femurs with a single note. San Marino is also a favorite for me because there are about 65 Sammarinese, and they deserve their day.
Sabrina: Totally, Ray. I was initially nauseated by the seemingly AI-generated imagery that played behind San Marino’s song. But then I looked up the number of people who live in San Marino (it’s like 33,000 people!) and I was just impressed that they made this song.
Dan: A few years ago their song featured Flo Rida. They originally asked Pitbull and he said, “No thank you very much. I don’t like the song.”
Sabrina: Well, that’s all the time we have to chat today, as all of us are very busy and important and our Eurovision expertise is needed urgently elsewhere. Drop your Eurovision thoughts in the chat below—what songs you want to win, what songs you’ll actually listen to in a year—and tune in Saturday for the final, an event that may yet heal our fractured world. And more importantly, stream Tautumeitas from Latvia!
Ray: Sabs, you burn with optimism’s flame. A noble and honorable stance that never fails to confuse me, given the global evidence.
