Eurovision 2024 preview: a roundup, plus my favourites and predictions
So how's Eurovision 2024 shaping up? After my experience in 2023, where I had 3 very strong favourite songs and a long tail of entires that I appreciated, I was careful to lower my expectations for 2024. I think that was a wise move, but I'm still very pleased with the music I've discovered and I think the contest itself should be a good one as long as all the interesting entries don't get knocked out at the semi-final stage. You can read my reviews of all 37 recorded songs in my previous posts (see Part 1 and Part 2).
Without going into excruciating detail (I feel no desire to rank all 37 entries!) here's my summary of the entries for Eurovision 2024. First, a quick roundup of the themes and patterns I see in this year's entries. Then: who do I think deserves to get knocked out in the semi-finals and who are my favourite entrants? And finally, trying to put aside my own musical taste, which entries do I think will do well and which stand a chance of winning?
2024 pre-contest roundup
First up, a couple of entries are due an update because they've been re-worked since I first reviewed them:
- Albania's song, "Zemrën n'dorë" has been translated into English, re-named "Titan" and given a re-arrangement and re-orchestration in the recording studio. I think swapping completely over to English was unnecessary and discards some character. Similarly, ditching the patter from the mid-section and instead adding a double-time ending seems like mere tinkering which doesn't fundamentally give much benefit. The re-orchestration sounds a bit classier to my ears, but this still gets zero stars from me.
- Czechia's song, "Pedestal" has been re-worked too: it's now filling the allowed 3 minutes but as I predicted now has zero occurrences of the word "bullshit". Shame! I feel like the extra musical material is a bit of a missed opportunity: there are 12 extra bars which basically feel like vamping, though they do built up nicely to the end, where there's now a clearly-defined guitar tune to finish off with. Nothing that changes my original 2-star rating though.
- 1990s Nostalgia. On the rock side, we have Czechia's almost Britpop style plus the late-90s Rammstein impression from Croatia. There are numerous 90s EDM sounds too: Finland, Netherlands, Iceland, Lithuania, UK and Austria for definite, with arguable 90s tinges in the songs from Australia, Denmark, Spain and Sweden. So by my reckoning we have 12 out of 37 entries with some 90s nostalgia content.
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| "Stop that, it's silly": Joost Klein & Windows95man. |
- Dembow. Like so much modern latin pop and reggaeton, 8 of this year's entries contain this rhythmic motif by my reckoning. Roughly speaking, dembow consists of 3 accented pulses across 4 beats (think "ONE-two-AND-three-FOUR"). Azerbaijan, Georgia, Luxembourg and Malta are straightforward examples. Cyprus, Italy and Moldova include this rhythm slightly more subtly, and have crafted better songs as a result. Greece's dembow rhythm is very unsubtle indeed, but avoids sounding clichéd overall because of the contrasting folk elements.
- Great bits in not-great songs. This was a mildly annoying theme this year while I was reviewing songs this year: several entries had snippets that I loved, hidden away amongst less impressive musical material:
- Austria's hard-hitting but blink-and-you'll-miss-'em breakbeats
- Cyprus' slow, dark and chunky EDM groove in the dance interlude
- Israel's opening synth sounds
- Netherlands' too-short-lived gabber breakdown
- Sweden's Daft Punk impression that peters out at the end
- Australia's didgeridoo sounds getting buried in the mix
- Lithuania's house groove that sounds great when it drops but subsequently goes nowhere
- Outsized folk influence. 2024 doesn't have a huge quantity of folk: by my count, there are 5 songs that are obviously folk-influenced to varying degrees: from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Greece and Norway. (Ukraine's vocal harmony in the backing track and Moldova's violins might both be considered folk-y, but I think that would be tenuous in both cases.) However, the quality and potential artistic impact of these 5 entries seems impressively high to me. Norway is a strong contender, and Armenia, Estonia and Greece seem to have made plenty of cultural impact online (whether or not that translates into voting success). Azerbaijan is the probably the weakest folk-influenced entry but it's still respectable.
- Questionable backing vocals on playback. This remains an issue for me, and I'm getting more hardline the more I come across this: I think vocals on playback should be straightforwardly disallowed like they used to be. The practice was introduced from 2021, nominally to discourage more singers than necessary being on stage, which in turn was supposed to reduce the overall transmission of Covid-19. Now that there's no need for this measure, it should be disallowed because of the effect it has on the ability to actually hear and judge the vocal delivery of performers. It also affects the commentary, and by extension the betting odds, when discussing entrants who have not qualified via a national final performance. This is because the official studio recordings of those entries can be available for many weeks before we have any actual evidence of whether the performer can do their song justice in a live context. I have plenty more to say about this, so in the interest of brevity, perhaps that's worth another post some other time.
My candidates for semi-final failure
Just like in 2023, 37 countries are participating, 6 of which get a bye into the Grand Final (the Big 5 plus last year's winners, Sweden) where they'll compete against 20 other qualifying countries. This means, once more, that 11 countries must be eliminated at the semi-final stage: 5 countries from Semi-Final #1, and 6 from Semi-Final #2. Here's my speculation as to who will get knocked out (and whether, in my opinion, they will be undeserved knock-outs).
Semi-Final #1:
- Cyprus (undeserved)
- Poland
- Azerbaijan
- Iceland
- Moldova (undeserved)
Semi-Final #2
- Albania
- San Marino (undeserved)
- Malta
- Georgia
- Israel
- Latvia
My personal favourite entries ranked
I awarded the following countries 3 stars or more in my scoring system, and this is how I'd rank them if I were in charge of the results overall:
6th: Finland (ridiculous 90s nostalgia EDM parody)
5th: Greece (mediterranean folk plus urban latin)
4th: Italy (beautifully-sung yet lively latin number)
3rd: Estonia (nordic folk instruments fused with hip-hop)
2nd: Norway (epic folk-metal)
1st: Armenia (pure folk party energy)
4 out of my 6 favourites are folk-influenced - I feel like it was a very close-run thing between Norway and Armenia for my top spot, but in the end I find Ladaniva's exuberance a bit more persuasive..
But how might the actual juries and televoting public view the contest? Time for some ill-informed speculation!
Juries and televotes: my predictions
Firstly, I don't imagine any of my personal top 3 have a chance of winning. Juries will probably give Norway decent scores and televotes should be pretty solid. I just don't think enough people will think that the epic folk rock style and dark fairy tale mood are amazing like I do. Definitely not enough to really make it a winner but I predict it will finish in the Top 10.
My clear personal favourite is Armenia, but realistically I have to admit a win for them is very unlikely indeed. I do, however, think they'll finish Top 10, which might seem optimistic, but here's my reasoning... I reckon that the choice of an unambiguous folk tune is a canny competitive
decision by
the Armenian delegation - Jako stands to pull in plenty of
Eastern European, Balkan, and Caucasus votes, plus of course from anyone
else throughout Europe who's into folk in general. It's also just
really positive and exuberant, and the upbeat 12/8 meter stands out in the crowd. If it weren't for the feat that Moldova's Zdob și Zdub pulled off in 2022
(7th
place overall, 2nd place in the televote, and all with a folk tune whose
main theme was an instrumental duo of fiddle and accordion) I'd be much gloomier, but I predict that Ladaniva
will do similarly well in 2024. Note here that I'm talking purely about televotes - based on Moldova in 2022 and Spain in 2023 I have no confidence that the juries will look favourably on Armenia's entry this year. Fingers crossed I'm wrong!
Armenia, together with Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands, could all potentially fulfil the "chaos party animal" role, inspiring large televote totals like Finland did in 2023 and Moldova in 2022. The main problem with that prediction is if all those acts compete really well they might well split the party vote. I still think Finland's Windows95man will win out against the Netherlands' Joost Klein on the grounds of sheer silliness - the fact that the sincerity within Joost's song will be quite hard to communicate to first-time listeners means these two acts will probably fight the televote over the territory of "who's the most bizarre?", which in my opinion gives the advantage to Finland. I hope I'm wrong, but I grudgingly predict that Estonia's 5miinust & Puuluup have enough of a niche sound and disorganised staging that they will be pushed well outside the Top 10 (and that's if they don't get a shock ejection at the semi-final stage).
Similarly, though I love Greece's entry, I am struggling to envisage this gaining huge jury vote totals, given its bewilderingly stark contrasts which many of the pop-focussed jurors will likely dismiss as just confusing. I see televotes being pretty solid but not enough to send it into the Top 10. Once more, I really hope I'm wrong.
I feel like Croatia and San Marino *ought* to be part of the "party animal" grouping, but probably won't be perceived as such because they are both rock songs. I've already predicted that San Marino will get undeservedly booted out at the semi-final stage. I'm struggling a bit to see why Croatia's Baby Lasagna has been ranked so high in the betting odds though. I suppose people hear a resemblance to the first half of Käärijä's "Cha Cha Cha" from last year, which is fair enough. For me, though, Baby Lasagna's 2024 song isn't as much of a grower, and doesn't bear as much repeat listening. He's also a less technically accomplished singer than other entrants, though whether that's relevant is moot. I predict he'll lose some popularity before the contest, do poorly on the jury vote, respectably in the televote, and finish Top 10.
Italy's Angelina Mango is my prediction for winner. As a representative of a "big 5" nation she gets to the final by default, so no semi-final shock is possible (plus Italy doesn't seem to have the recent history of poor placings that the rest of the Big 5 has). The song is boisterous and lively, it's definitely latin in feel but it's non-obvious, and the vocals show plenty of variety. In particular I think Angelina will simultaneously satisfy the "ooh what a lovely voice" kind of voter that might have voted for Italy's Marco Mengoni in 2023, as well as the "ooh what a bop" crowd.
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| Boredom never sounded so good - Angelina Mango ftw! |
Add to that the video evidence from Italy's national final showing how technically excellent she is when singing live, and you can see why the bookies have her down as one of the favourites. Current odds are around 6/1 to win, and have been for weeks, meaning Italy has been 3rd in the list of favourites for a while now. I think this song bears lots of re-listening because of the interesting orchestration and I think Angelina can keep up her buzz during the run-up to the contest proper, not least because she's participating in the official Pre-Party shows which seem to be so essential to building up a Eurovision fan base nowadays.
I would have left my list of predictions there, were it not for more recent evidence which changed my outlook, and by the looks of it has also made the bookies take notice. Footage of Switzerland's Nemo performing at the Madrid Pre-Party put to rest many of my worries that I had about the live performance of the very high vocal lines. Aside from a few notes leading into the 2nd chorus where Nemo chose the lower octave, the highest vocal lines were sung at pitch, with solid tone and great accuracy, not to mention swapping between head voice, falsetto and spoken word easily. Some singers seem to struggle with maintaining their pitch accuracy in different ranges or at different volumes, but Nemo does not appear to be one of them.
For an early outing in a live context, this was such an accurate, engaging and confident performance that I think Switzerland is now a very serious contender. I still think that the chaotic switches in and out of drum'n'bass feel in The Code will put some televoters off where the Latin feel of La Noia won't, meaning that Italy still beat Switzerland, but I reckon it'll be close. I also think juries are likely to rate Italy and Switzerland similarly highly for the quality of both performers' vocal delivery.
My predictions: quick summary
- Italy's Angelina Mango to win
- Switzerland's Nemo to be the main challenger
- Rest of the Top 10 to include:
- Finland
- Netherlands
- Croatia
- Norway
- Armenia
- Grand final qualifiers that won't make the Top 10 to include:
- Estonia
- Greece
- Entrants who don't qualify for the Grand Final to be:
- Cyprus
- Poland
- Azerbaijan
- Iceland
- Moldova
- Albania
- San Marino
- Malta
- Georgia
- Israel
- Latvia
Those predictions were made at the time of writing (16 April 2024). I'm looking forward to seeing how wrong I was in a few weeks' time!
