United by Music

It's time for another round of Eurovision 2025 reviews! The countdown to the live shows is still ticking away and the playlist is getting more familiar with every listen. Let's dive straight in and discuss the entries from Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Israel and Italy. Israel: Yuval Raphael - "New Day Will Rise" Israel's participation in Eurovision continues to be a highly contentious issue among fans, with many people, including recently the Icelandic foreign minister, calling for their exclusion in light of the conflict in Gaza. As I said in my  Eurovision preview , I fully respect the position of those who have chosen not to cover Israel's song this year, however, Eurovision is not a competition between governments, and the song has been deemed eligible to participate by the EBU, so I will separate my opinions on this from what I see in the news as much as I can. That being said, "New Day Will Rise", this year's Israeli entry, really does feel l...

Eurovision 2025 is drawing ever closer and if I am to finish reviewing all 37 entries before the week of the live shows, I really must crack on! So without any further ado, let's discuss the songs from Azerbaijan, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Luxembourg and Portugal. Luxembourg: Laura Thorn - "La poupée monte le son" Last year saw the first appearance of Luxembourg in Eurovision since 1993, when Tali took the country to the left-hand side of the board in the final with "Fighter". This year the Luxembourg Song Contest has returned and given us Laura Thorn, performing "La poupée monte le son", which translates to "the doll turns up the sound". Most dedicated Eurovision fans will be aware of France Gall, who won Eurovision for Luxembourg in 1965 with "Pou pée de cire, pou pée de son", a song that remains a much-loved classic - and this year's song feels like quite a clear effort to capitalise on this in its sixtieth anniversary year. ...

Welcome to the first of what will hopefully be seven Eurovision 2025 review blogs! It's fairly self-explanatory, and every Eurovision blogger worth their salt is doing something similar at the moment but to summarise: I will be taking five or six countries at a time, and discussing their selected artists and songs. I'm planning to focus more on the selection processes and songs themselves rather than how I think they might do at Eurovision; I'll leave that to my prediction blogs a little bit later on when we have more information about staging etc.  To finish off each review, I will be giving every song a score out of 10 - again, this is for the song alone, I've tried to separate the songs from their performances and stagings as much as possible (which was easier said than done in some cases) to give a more concrete idea of which songs I am favouring heading in to the contest, and allow me to award my douze points  once we have looked at all the songs. You'll see as...

The grand final of this year's Eurovision Song Contest is less than one month away, and soon we will know who will succeed Nemo and become this year's champion. It has been another turbulent Eurovision season, with too much national selection drama to cover in full detail and a list of withdrawals and disqualifications longer than my arm. Unfortunately one of this list is Moldova, who made the decision to withdraw from the contest in January "following a detailed analysis of the current situation, as well as the economic, administrative, and artistic challenges". The Moldovan broadcaster cited decreased public interest in Eurovision and the overall quality of the "plays and artistic performances" in the national selection as reasons for their withdrawal. Whilst Moldova's presence will certainly be missed in Eurovision this year, they have indicated that they may be returning at some point soon so hopefully this isn't 'goodbye', just 'see ...