Oh Yes, It’s Ladies Night
One of the first things you might notice about Semi Final Two is the simple demographic swing in gender balance compared to Semi One. Not including the Automatic Qualifiers, only two of Tuesday’s participants were female-led acts (Poland’s Justyna Steczkowska and Albania’s Shkodra Elektronike). Tonight, the pendulum veers the other way, with ten of the sixteen representatives being female led. This imbalance is purely unintentional, as the draw that determined the Semi Final lineup was held in late January, well before most participating nations announced or selected their representatives. It’s just a bit odd to realize that we’ll hear more voices from the Latvian act alone than we heard on Tuesday night.
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Another big headline for this Semi Final (and one I alluded to in our last Spotter’s Guide), is the fact that three of this show’s songs (and their respective stagings) are unabashedly, fabulously cheeky and sex-positive. We open our show with Go-Jo from Australia plying his double-entendre-laden wares as your friendly neighborhood Milkshake Man, Malta’s Miriana Conte in spot nine Serving a song that was originally titled an innocuous word in Maltese that ended up causing a censorship kerfuffle (“kant” just means “singing”, we swear!), and we end the running on a climactic note from Finland, where Erika Vikman’s Ich Komme is the audio representation of a very horizontal idea. If innuendo is not your vibe, consider this your “fair warning”!”
Out of the Toybox, Onto the Stage
Even though songs at Eurovision need to be originals, and unreleased commercially prior to this past autumn, that doesn’t mean that an act can’t stand on the shoulders of giants. Enter Luxembourg, who’s bringing us La poupée monte le son by Laura Thorn. The song’s title and themes are directly referencing France Gall’s winning song from 1965, Poupée de cire, poupée de son, but modernizing the Serge Gainsbourg yé-yé song. Instead of the singer being a simple singing doll who’ll perform for you with no free will or lived experience of her own (as she was in 1965), the dolly’s pulling her own strings and making decisions for herself. Will the voting audience get the references to a now sixty-year-old song, or does the 2025 update stand on its own merits? Time will tell.
Words, Words, Words
This is a great year in general for linguistic diversity, and this Semi Final shows that off with twelve songs in tonight’s show using their non-English national tongues. (We’re disregarding Australia, Ireland, Malta, and the United Kingdom here.) Only Austria, Denmark, and Czechia opt to sing fully in English. (Armenia’s song Survivor was originally in English when selected, but a line in Armenian will be included.) We’ll have the first song fully in Latvian to appear at Eurovision since 2004’s Dziesma par laimi, we’re hearing Georgian for the first time since 2019, Montenegrin for the first time since 2018, and automatic qualifier Germany is sending a fully monolingual German entry for the first time since Guildo Horn’s Guildo hat euch lieb in 1998, when the native-language rule was still in effect.
Velcro at the Ready…
One of the most beloved aspects of a song’s staging is, of course, the absolutely fabulous outfits worn by our contestants, particularly if an act has a costume change, whether it’s a cheeky Bucks Fizz-style “skirty-rippy-offy” or a drastic, head-to-toe transformation. For fans of the sartorial swap, you’ll be like a pig in mud during tonight’s Semi Final. Out of the nineteen songs being performed, we’ll have about twelve costume changes over ten acts, plus a bonus blindfold removal. It seems like we’ll actually have more fireworks with our outfits than actual pyrotechnics!
This isn’t a lost member of Måneskin, it’s Georgia’s Mariam Shengelia. (photo: EBU/Alma Bengtsson)
Techies Working Overtime
This is also a Semi Final chock-full of massive on-stage props and backdrops, which may lead to exceptionally-long tech transitions between them. If a between-song break feels just a tad too long, it might be because the folks behind the scenes are lugging off the UK’s off-kilter chandelier or dragging Malta’s disco ball into just the right spot. Just be patient, and know that there’s probably something amazing waiting for you on the other side of that minor delay.
Ze Rak Sport
Early in the show, our hosts Hazel and Sandra make a joke that Eurovision and football have more in common than you’d expect. I’d actually zoom out beyond just one sport, and highlight some of the other athletic pursuits on display tonight: sprinting from Armenia, mountain climbing in Greece, sailing from Austria…beach volleyball in France?
Louane, France (photo: EBU/Sarah Louise Bennett)
A Family Reunion
And then there’s our interval, welcoming back a few familiar faces with the songs that we would have heard back in 2020, if the Contest that year had not been cancelled. Gjon’s Tears, The Roop, Efendi, and Destiny come together for a rousing melody five years in the making. And, if our calculations are correct, this marks Destiny’s fourth vocal appearance at Eurovision. From the Junior Eurovision winner featured in 2016, the hidden backing performer for Michaela Pace in 2019, Je Me Casse in 2021, and now tonight, making up for the lost 2020 Contest, Destiny has now appeared on as many Eurovision stages as Valentina Monetta!
Whether you like your staging over-the-top or simple and pyro-free, we hope you enjoy the show tonight!