The time has come: After a typically turbulent month of gimmicks, weird social media videos, and more fondue than anyone’s doctor would recommend, the Eurovision Song Contest will hold its Grand Final on Saturday.
This year, the competition – Europe’s solution to getting caught in a loop of devastating and, at the time, seemingly endless world wars – will take place in Basel, Switzerland, diminishing the chances of tens of thousands of pro-Hamas protesters encircling the area and threatening the Israeli contestant, as happened last year in the notoriously multicultural city of Malmö, Sweden. By “diminish the chances,” we mean that only one guy so far has openly threatened to cut October 7 survivor Yuval Raphael’s throat in public and Greta Thunberg hasn’t shown up, which is somehow an improvement over last year.
With marginally less Middle East conflict elbowing itself into the world’s most flamboyant competitive event (sorry, figure skating), the controversies have centered more on the outrageous results of the semifinals – Cyprus and its ridiculous techno song allegedly about the Vitruvian Man (???) was robbed! – and the current state of Finnish patriotism.
And the falsettos. Always the falsettos.
With 37 songs in a dizzying array of genres and cultural references to even the most obscure communities in Europe, Eurovision can be a an overwhelming experience for newcomers. Every year, Breitbart News offers a helping hand in trying – emphasis on the word trying – to make sense of sequins, unexpected rap segues, and double entendres assaulting our European and Australian brothers and sisters during this chaotic time.
As a longtime American Eurovision fan, I do not hesitate to say this was the best year of songs in my lifetime based on originality, vocal ability, and sheer fun. It’s been a weird, hilarious ride (except for the one song about the guy’s wife having cancer), and 2026 has its work cut out for it to be even remotely memorable after this. Below, all the songs you need to know to understand this year’s Eurovision landscape – for better or worse.
Will Win: Austria – JJ, “Wasted Love”
“Wasted Love” is an insipid song clearly attempting to copy last year’s champion, Nemo’s “The Code,” by offering entirely too much falsetto. This is not anything anyone would listen to if given the choice in their spare time. As an avid Eurovision fan, I have been maligning this song for months as the victim of a common Eurovision trend by which countries attempt to make a worse version of the champion from the year before, or a popular song that got close to winning, hoping to gain the votes of devoted viewers.
Then I watched JJ, real name Johannes Pietsch, actually perform the song live at the second semi-final on Thursday. JJ is a countertenor/male soprano opera singer, not an aspiring rapper like Nemo, with extensive theater experience, most recently at the Vienna State Opera. He may be most famous for his reality TV stints on The Voice and Starmania, but Austria takes this kind of music seriously – and judging from the old video he apparently posted to Youtube as a teen, so has Pietsch since late childhood.
He has the kind of rare vocal ability that sounds far better live than it does on the studio recording and his team created original, captivating, and surprisingly minimalist (well, for Eurovision) visuals that do not distract from his amazing voice. Nemo had to hit his high notes on a spinning top – JJ doesn’t need gimmicks to prove his talent.
The jury is going to drown this man in points, regardless of how much the people vote for their perceived favorite (see below). And in the end, I believe his performance is so moving that JJ will take a significant percentage of the popular vote, as well, and potentially end the years-long controversy of the people choosing differently from the “experts.”
Should Win: Sweden (but actually Finland) – KAJ, “Bara Bada Bastu”
JJ is not the oddsmakers’ favorite for the Eurovision trophy. KAJ, a band best described as “Finnish Lonely Island,” stands in his way, a longshot favorite with a rap-pop song about enjoying a sauna with your buddies that employs copious accordion and is written in an obscure dialect of Swedish spoken in Finland (hence being recruited by Sweden, according to the band).
The song has been a massive sensation throughout Europe and is the most streamed Eurovision entry on Spotify – evidence that, unlike “Wasted Love,” it’s something normal people will listen to for fun, repeatedly.
The road to Eurovision was not easy for KAJ. To represent Sweden, the winningest country in Eurovision history alongside Ireland, candidates have to enter a high-production, extremely competitive national contest known as Melodifestivalen, comparable possibly only to Italy’s Sanremo Music Festival in prestige. This year’s Melodifestivalen had a clear favorite, and it wasn’t Finnish comedians: it was former champion Måns Zelmelöw, who initially did not take the loss well.
In contrast, Finland sent this to Eurovision last year.
This year’s Finnish representative – Erika Vikman, who is performing a song called “Ich Komme” (“I’m Coming”) in a performance that requires her to mount a giant microphone shooting out pyrotechnics – has struggled to come out of KAJ’s shadow. One recent poll found that nearly 60 percent of Finns want Sweden, the Yankees of Eurovision, to win again because they like KAJ just that much. The president of Finland, Swedish-speaking Finn Alexander Stubb, is openly rooting for them. Even the official Eurovision Instagram account irritated Vikman by using “Bara Bada Bastu” lyrics for a caption under one of her videos (KAJ themselves have attempted to irritate Vikman by making fun of her luxurious hotel accommodations and, later, showing up to her hotel and just yelling from the ground floor).
This is a lot of backstory and not a lot of explanation for why this song, “Bara Bada Bastu” (“Just Go Sauna”), should win the Eurovision Song Contest. The reality is that nobody would care about the language quirks of Finland or KAJ’s hotel hijinks if the song was not good. The lyrics are hilarious, the flow of the rap is surprising good for a language so ill-suited to the genre, and the vocal harmonies are impressive. The KAJ gentlemen play some of their own instruments and wrote their song. The theme is original (as opposed to “Wasted Love,” which is a song about … take a guess) and mundane/silly while also being an impressive work of art on its own.
JJ has an amazing voice, but it is just one voice – KAJ has three that work extremely well together. And while JJ would win any vocal competition by a mile, this is the Eurovision Song Contest, not the European Voice, and unfortunately for him, “Wasted Love” is just not a good enough song.
Rest of the Best: As mentioned above, 2025 is a superlative year in Eurovision talent. There were too many songs that could have fit this category to go here, and those mentioned below could have easily romped to a win in a weaker year. Unfortunately for them, there can only be one champion.
United Kingdom – Remember Monday, “What the Hell Just Happened?”
Remember Monday are not explicitly a comedy group like KAJ, but their entry about a drunken night out that they swear doesn’t happen often serves as a sort of female counterweight to “Bara Bada Bastu” – sauna with the boys, drunk dialing your ex with the girls. Their vocal harmonies are excellent – they posted a stripped down version of the song online to prove they do not rely on autotune – and the song brings an American country quality extremely rare in Eurovision entries.
This is fun, looks great, radically departs from usual Eurovision fare, and has that rare quality at the contest of being written in correct English and being top 40-radio ready. It is expected to bring the UK its highest ranking in years – and definitely deserves to.
Albania – Shkodra Elektronike, “Zjerm”
The most fun thing about Eurovision is the sheer volume of interesting music put out there. A lot of the interesting music is not necessarily good, and a lot of the decent tunes churned out for the contest are not necessarily interesting. “Zjerm” is arguably the most sonically interesting entry in this year’s contest that is also phenomenally pleasant to listen to, and catchy without having a bubble-gum pop quality to it. A middle-aged guy has an entire rap bridge in Albanian halfway through the song and this is not disruptive to the flow of the song in any way.
The band have explained in past interviews that “Zjerm” is a nod to a folk tale about a mother killed by the walls of a castle in the pursuit of safety for their child. Adding to the passion of the project, singer Beatriçe Gjergji’s was heavily involved in their presentation, designing her showstopper red flame dress. The fact that the song and performance is a hometown, family affair can be felt in the delivery and makes this an unforgettable entry.
Estonia – Tommy Cash, “Espresso Macchiato”
Tommy Cash is also unforgettable, for other reasons. It feels a little dirty to put him on a list that includes bona fide opera singers and some of the most impressive harmonies on the continent, but “Espresso Macchiato” deserves its place. But first, a little about Tommy.
For those who know this Estonian shock artist, the true shock in “Espresso Macchiato” is that the song features no profanity and the video no nudity, gore, or other obscene content. It doesn’t even explicitly insult the Eurovision Song Contest, unlike another song he released literally two months ago alongside disqualified 2024 Eurovision candidate Joost Klein (but that is a story for another time).
He is part of what can be loosely described as the Eurovision Underworld, collaborating with artists who have participated in Eurovision with weird, bizarre, and sometimes plain bad entries. In addition to the notorious Joost, Cash has had the honor of collaborating with Käärijä, the winner of the popular vote in 2023 with the metal-rap-electronic song “Cha Cha Cha” and with Little Big, the Russian contestants in the 2020 Eurovision contest canceled due to the pandemic – and deserved winners that year, if you ask me (like every year, nobody did, but I wrote it up anyway).
So for this artist to come up with a song so understated and humble and fun is quite a surprise. “Espresso Macchiato” is basically a collection of Italian stereotypes written in bad English and nonsense Romance language – as Italians have been arguing, “por favore” is neither Italian nor Spanish. But the song was so powerful that it had Italians in an uproar for months denouncing it as an outrage. And yet they couldn’t stop talking about it – and their nursing homes couldn’t stop dancing to it. Taking the Italian elderly by storm while being followed by Eric Andre on social media – now that’s range.
Greece – Klavdia, “Asteromata”
The better of two lovely songs competing in the final about displacement, immigration, and/or exile – the second being Portugal’s “Deslocado” – “Asteromata” tells the story of a mother saying goodbye to her daughter. The critical context to the meaning is that singer Klavdia is of Pontic Greek descent: ethnic Greeks who once lived in Anatolia but were one of several groups targeted in the first modern genocide by the Young Turks, alongside the Armenians and Assyrians indigenous to that land. Songs referencing the Turkish genocides, which Turkey still denies, are not uncommon at Eurovision despite the “no politics” rule, but Armenia usually leads the charge on that front.
The lyrics, translated from the Greek, are devastating, but Klavdia’s voice is what truly makes this a compelling and dramatic showcase that sets itself apart from the usual Eurovision ballad sludge. This isn’t a silly or fun Eurovision entry, but it is an essential piece of art about displacement that deserves a spot on the final stage.
Worst of the Worst: In most years, the hard part is paring down the list of least listenable Eurovision sludge. Longtime Breitbart Eurovision fans will know this is usually a list of forgettable ballads and one or true truly “wtf” entries – but this year, even the ballads were stirring! Except for France, which ends up on this list almost every year. “Enjoy” the following list.
Lithuania – Katarsis, “Tavo Akys”
This song belongs on the soundtrack of a young adult show about surviving a post-apocalyptic hellscape, not on the Eurovision stage. I assume it made it to the final because Eurovision audiences have never heard 1990s Seattle grunge before. I certainly remember first hearing Nirvana as a child and wondering what could possibly be so bad in these people’s lives to make such ugly music – but I was raised in New Jersey, where we have sunshine and beaches, so clearly I was not the target audience. Imagine listening to this from Mykonos or Ibiza!
Katarsis is part of a trend I noticed this year of, for lack of a better term, “straight guy”-friendly acts making it through to the final. Songs like those presented by the aforementioned Cyprus or Belgium with overt LGBT appeal faltered where grunge, cute American-style Southern damsels, and bro sauna anthems soared (hanging out with your bros in a sauna may sound “gay” to American audiences but trust us, for Eurovision this is basically Toby Keith). It’s a trend that giveth and, in this case, taketh away.
Poland – Justyna Steczkowska, “Gaja”
Why is this woman yelling at me?
That is the main response “Gaja” elicits – no desire to dance, or contemplate life, or reflect on any deep lyrics (the lyrics are faux-pagan gibberish) – just, “what did I do to deserve this lady screeching at me for this long?”
There are several problems with this entry, the first and less severe being that this feels very dated. This is what Eurovision entries used to be like in the early aughts and ’10s – a terrifying “sexy” lady yelling while being surrounded by incomprehensible chaos. Sometimes it was fun, sometimes it was painful. This was the latter.
As a maximalist – you kind of have to be to enjoy Eurovision – this is too much even for me. The live performance is designed to be a sensory overload experience inspired by Game of Thrones, but it essentially consists of Steczkowska shrieking for what feels like 20 minutes while an animated dragon designed for a Playstation 2 game flies out at the screen at you. To quote one anonymous fan on Reddit: “Poland is horrendous. Can’t fathom the appeal. It’s just too much of… everything. And the dragon on top of that? Come on, grow up.”
France – Louane, “Maman”
France, as usual, has the exact opposite problem from Poland this year: sending the most boring song you have ever heard in your life because France is “sophisticated,” i.e. too good of a country to send something fun. Louane has a bit of the JJ problem – great singer, mediocre-at-best song – but at least “Wasted Love” tries to be dramatic. “Maman” is just an emotionally manipulation: vote for this song or you don’t love your mother!
The French team gets some credit from me for the obnoxious and hilarious decision to try to make Louane appear to be trapped in an hourglass by dumping what appears to be 100 pounds of sand on her throughout the performance. Rumor has it that it takes the French four minutes to set up the stage of this disaster, and keen observers of the rehearsals noted that Louane seemed to struggle to continue singing while mounds of sand got stuck in her mouth during practice. Can’t accuse the French of not having a sense of humor, but this talented poor woman deserved better.
Malta – Miriana Conte, “Serving”
There are so many reasons this is awful, but let’s start with the name of the song, which was not originally “Serving.” It was “Kant,” the Maltese word for “singing.” The original chorus was “do re mi fa so so-serving kant,” with “kant” pronounced exactly like what most Anglophones agree is the most offensive curse word in our language. “Serving c__” is a slang term in the LGBT community that typically means being boldly feminine. A clever pun!
I’m not especially offended that Miriana Conte tried to pull a fast one and get that word on the BBC. But I am offended that she then proceeded to pretend she had no idea why anyone was offended.
Her fans then acted as if their free speech rights (in Europe?) had been personally violated when there was a request – it remains a mystery from who – that she please edit her song not to be yelling, uh, kant during a family-friendly program. Conte claimed to be “surprised” and “disappointed” by the request to edit the song and suggested that no two people would understand the phrase in her chorus the same way. She has not explained why, if not censoring the Maltese language was so important to her, only one word in her song was in Maltese.
When asked by some affected BBC guy if her “intention” with the controversial lyrics was to get attention, Conte, even more pretentiously, denied that she intended to generate publicity! “My intention was to serve singing,” she said, which doesn’t mean anything.
So all of this is already extremely tiresome, but then there is the actual song, which has the same problem as “Gaja” – it’s a whole lot of yelling and obnoxious synths for very little payoff. The lyrics outside of the controversial ones are bland calls to “live your life” or whatever, resulting in a worse version of 5,000 other songs that already exists. And the aesthetics of the live performance, which feature Conte and backup dancers bouncing on what appear to be gym balls, random Lisa Frank-style big cats, and a wall of opening legs (remember, her “intention was to serve singing”), are downright hideous.
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