The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest Looks To Shrug Off Whispers of a 'Weak' Year

When the world is burning, and we seem locked into a worst-case-scenario style simulation that boggles the mind on an hour-to-hour basis, it’s important to find coping mechanisms that can lift your mood, if only for a short time. This time of year can feel particularly bountiful between the jet-fueled ice dance bequeathed to us from our amazing, wonderful neighbors to the north and the campy, queer-friendly song contest gifted to the world from those godforsaken, weaponless, quality-of-life continentals across the pond.

Playoff hockey is always amazing, and this year it’s been even more fun to root for all the Canadian teams. I’ve spent nearly a half century gently mocking anything Leafs, Canucks, Jets, Flames, Sens, Oilers or Habs (especially Les Habitants) but this year I’d fistfight a moose to defend the honor of any one of them. Hockey is fun, but playoff hockey is straight lightning.

Less prominent on the collective American entertainment radar is the European Song Contest. People here tend to be tangentially aware of Eurovision as the shoulder-shrug Will Ferrell film and not much more. One of the basic tenets of American Exceptionalism, that everything from ‘Murica is #1, actively works against external global entertainment powerhouses like the FIFA World Cup, the World Cup of Rugby, anything Cricket-related and can even fend off multibillion dollar series like Anpanman, which has raked in more money worldwide than the MCU.

Americans tend to gravitate toward global sporting events where we get to kick commie ass (“commie” being any nation/idea/individual that doesn’t own shares of Microsoft and eat Raising Cain’s Fried Chicken on the reg), which is why the Olympics are always a big draw, and the Tour De France became a thing you could watch in the US during the heyday of iconic American Hero Lance Armstrong’s record seven victories only to wane in popularity once he was outed as a garden variety, cheating dickweasel. Over the last two decades or so, Americans seem to have incrementally begun to embrace international futbol, thanks to the excellence of the US Women’s National Team, but the men’s game is still not appointment TV because how much can a country get into an international futbol competition where their 11 is an afterthought? In terms of reticence to embrace soccer, the US is missing out on several premiere global events, which make the NFL Super Bowl, the mightiest sporting show of any year inside the echo chamber, look quaint by comparison.

Even so, the men’s World Cup kicks off in June, which I plan to cover for Pajiba while (hopefully) coming off a contact high from Lord Stanley’s cup and the blissful comeuppance of watching as it chooses this year to snub the orange menace and make its way home to Canada.

Unlike the Olympics, Eurovision has had a comparatively slow adoption rate here in the US, which always surprises me since it feels like the Olympics of songs. American Idol is certainly a factor, as are the confounding concepts of joy, kindness, and inclusion. But what’s more American than a heart-wrenching, winner-take-all battle between sovereign nations where political messaging is suffocated, flags are banned, film is doctored, money is king on high, and officials lie through their teeth? Still, for those of us stateside who are in on the secret, May is a month we look forward to every year.

Last year’s Eurovision Song Contest was a strong one, causing many to view this year’s crop as less than stellar. Despite that framing, of the 37 participating nations, there are some impressive submissions and a number of catchy earworm-style tunes. As always in the ESC, video killed the radio star, and two disparate factions remain locked in impasse for the soul of Eurovision. For the purists, it’s fundamentally a song contest, like the name says, and the key elements that secure victory are the musical ability of the singer and the quality of the song itself. Scowling at the purists from across the aisle are the hoi polloi, like me, people who absolutely marvel at the skill of the elite performers, but generally tune in to have fun and place more emphasis on charisma, performance, and likeability of the act.

The way voting works can seem complicated to a new viewer, but basically, each competing nation has a “jury” that gets to vote for a winner. They can’t vote for their own country, and the national juries tend to favor the purist side of the philosophy. Then there’s a public vote where people from all over the world vote for their favorite songs. The Jury and Public votes are each worth 50% of the overall vote, and the way it tends to go down, especially lately, is that you have a runaway crowd favorite that ends up in a disappointing second-place spot to the Jury favorite, who wins the competition.

There’s a fairly clear pattern emerging. You get an impressive solo performance that knocks out a much more catchy and crowd-pleasing alliterative nonsense song. In 2023, Sweden won with Tattoo, a song performed by Lorene. It defeated Cha Cha Cha, a beloved banger from Finland’s Käärijä.

In 2024, Switzerland’s Nemo won for The Code, another beautiful solo performance. It edged out Rim Tim Tagi Dim, a Croatian offering from singer Baby Lasagna that was, like Cha Cha Cha, clearly the most popular song in the competition.

So, my guess is that the same pattern will continue this year with an inspiring vocalist knocking off a song that everyone will sing along with.

I’m fully unqualified to rate music in any way, but to my untrained ear, there’s a solo performance that’s orders of magnitude more impressive than any other this year. Representing Austria, opera singer JJ’s vocal range in Wasted Love seems utterly jaw-dropping to me, and when I queried much more knowledgeable music-industry friends, they were also blown away.

Likewise, this year there’s another playful submission that has taken the audience by storm. Sweden, tied with Ireland for the most Eurovision wins of all time, sends Swedish-speaking Finns KAJ to the competition with Bara Bada Bastu, a catchy-as-hell rumination on the near-religious dedication to saunas in Scandinavia.

My son is going to Finland on a school trip, so I’ve been reading up on it, and according to this NYT piece, all Finnish government buildings have a sauna, and there’s more than one sauna for every two Finns.

By all the standard metrics people use to try to project the Eurovision winner, such as YouTube watches, Spotify spins, etc., Sweden is out in front of the pack. In addition, bookies have them as the top choice for people who love to wager on things like this, although somehow they seem to think that Sweden might just pull it off and become the winningest country in Eurovision history.

I wouldn’t mind that a bit. Here’s Sweden’s charming Petra Mede, being amazing. This is an interval act from last year in Malmo where Sweden gloated about their wins, poked fun at their Scandinavian neighbors and celebrated the unlikely upset of the Finns by surprising everyone and inviting Käärijä back to perform.

Thanks to Nemo’s win for Switzerland last year, this year’s competition is in Basel, Switzerland. If you win, you get to host, bringing in a treasure trove of tourist spending as part of the boon. So far, the pre-events have been a liiiiiiiitle bit dicey, so most of us are holding our breath and hoping that everything comes together at the last minute.

A few more songs to put on your radar that are among my favorites.

Käärijä’s pal from Estonia, Tommy Cash, offers up Espresso Macchiato, an inane coffee tribute that some people think is a deeply veiled mockery of Trump and his long ties. One of my friends said, “I’ve never seen dancing like that. All of his appendages are dancing as if they have no idea what any other appendage is doing.”

Host country Switzerland’s submission this year, Voyage from Zoë Më, is a haunting and powerful song about lifelong journeys.

And Netherlands bounces back from an offensive, preposterous expulsion last year. In 2024, the oddsmaker’s darling was Joost Klein’s Europapa, which was sort of the ideal Eurovision entry.

Unfortunately, Klein was suspended on the eve of the grand final for purportedly shaking his fist in frustration at a member of another team’s staff who was filming him in a place where that wasn’t allowed. One minute, he was a favorite to win, and the next, Netherlands was just erased from the competition pending an investigation, which, months later, found zero evidence of wrongdoing. It was one of the most egregious and moronically handled events I’ve ever seen, and it sucked even more because it was Joost’s lifelong dream and the song was a moving tribute to his parents. Netherlands almost didn’t send a song this year, but in the end, sent Claude with C’est La Vie. While he doesn’t have JJ’s command, a make-good vote for Netherlands might be on the minds of many voters this year, making it a dark horse.

And here’s a quick look at the full competition:

The Eurovision Song Competition is just hours away, with a semifinal today May 13th, a second Semi-final on Thursday May 15th and then the Grand Final on Saturday May 17th. All shows start at 3pm EST in the USA and can be watched live on Peacock.