I believe the correct term for my response to this was: I was gagged.
FELICIA was performing her absolute banger of a Melodifestivalen entry, ‘My System’ to the crowd in Gothenburg at the second heat of Melodifestivalen. Combining the sounds and melodies from the EDM era to a more modern, more rave-like production, this sounds viciously fresh for Melodifestivalen, taking Sweden’s family friendly entertainment-for-all into an unapologetically cool nightclub.
Think what Marcus and Martinus did at the Song Contest, but with attitude.
But that wasn’t the gag. That was just the setting that meant I couldn’t take my eyes off this performance, with excellent and intense laser play and a sassiness to sell it.
But there was one more gear to go into with thirty seconds left. Not in that schlager way of old by shoving in a key change, or ripping off the dress for a shorter skirt that was once fashionable. Instead ‘My System’ pushed this wall of electronic noise to its limits, cranking up the frequency one semitone at a time in an intense crescendo of electronic energy before the production slammed it straight down to the floor again.
First one beat, and we see FELICIA’s right hand claw itself onto the TV screen. Then the next beat, and her left hand joins the party, and as the title line slams down to complete the trio, the those two hands grab on the bottom of the screen and thrust FELICIA’s alter ego seemingly out of the TV screen. It’s not just FELICIA. What we see is a mask-off, bespectacled diva variant emerging out of her cocoon from the first 2 minutes 40 seconds of the show.
Those three seconds are a stunning example of brilliant live music entertainment. Let’s talk about that moment from a technical perspective, from an emotional perspective, and from the perspective of competitiveness as Melodifestivalen ends and Sweden sets its sights on Eurovision itself.
A Technical Masterpiece
One of the technical stylistic choices that we have seen increasingly utilised in song presentations has been to change the aspect ratio. For most people watching the show on a modern widescreen television, your screen is very likely to have a 16:9 ratio. For example, if you screen is 160 cm wide, then the height in the right ratio would give a height of 90 cm.
When the title screen for ‘My System’ fades against back to the action on stage, that widescreen aspect ratio is quietly changed. Instead of being in 16:9, FELICIA appears on screen in an aspect ratio of 2.39:1, that is 2.39 times wider than it is tall.
This is a common ratio for filming in cinema, which filmmaker Noam Kroll states is ideal for ”dramatic narrative film content” or for creating ”very dramatic framing”. The downside of this stylistic choice is that, for a contest like Melodifestivalen predominantly played on widescreen TVs from Malmö to Malmberget, it leaves some of the screen unused, so there are black letterboxes at the top and bottom of the screen as a necessary downside.
But it’s that downside that becomes the song upside. We stay in this extra wide aspect ratio all the way through until we get to the song’s climax. While the remainder of the screen remains in 2.39:1, FELICIA’s alter ego is superimposed on the screen in 16:9. This superimposition is what allows the pop from the screen effect to take place, as the Eurovision community’s staging guru Daniel Stridh explained.
“So what they do is a two-layer process. They use a normal green screen behind her, just like you would shoot any movie or anything. But then in front of her, just below her neck, there is another board. It could be made of cardboard or wood or anything. It’s painted green, and when she grabs it and moves her hands over the board, her palms will be covered, but her fingers will not.
So it will, when you remove all the green and overlap that onto the black bars of the TV screen, it will look like she’s grabbing onto them and getting herself literally out of the screen and towards the viewer.”
To amplify that effect further, note how the team create a murky digital landscape around FELICIA’s alter ego. This provides the plane for which FELICIA can pop out of, almost acting like some sort of otherworldly liquid. This adds to the perception of depth and of thrusting FELICIA out from the screen, like a swimmer jumping out of the water.
And those final 20 seconds, with that final “I can’t get you out of my system” lyric hitting the audience one more time, they go back again into the 2.39:1 cinematic aspect ratio. It’s literally for three seconds and three seconds only that FELICIA breaks the fourth wall and invades millions of Swedish TV screens simultaneously.
The Emotional Transformation
We need to spend time talking about not just the spectacle of FELICIA’s grand finale, we also need to talk about the presence of the spectacles themselves.
There’s a long and somewhat complicated history to FELICIA’s history. Yes, many of the readers of ESC Insight will be aware of FELICIA’s previous Melodifestivalen appearance under the persona of Fröken Snusk in 2024. But Fröken Snusk hasn’t transformed into FELICIA, FELICIA has broken free of the shackles of her previous project.
Producer Rasmus Gozzi created the concept of Fröken Snusk, or Miss Dirty, as a project of the producer rather than as artist-led identity. Part of that process was the character’s identity being hidden by the iconic pink balaclava.
Yet at the start of 2025 we learnt that the original Fröken Snusk vocalist had been replaced. FELICIA, speaking once starting a solo project of her own in the summer of 2025, spoke about the tough working conditions in her previous work. Speaking to Aftonbladet, she has spoken about severe exhaustion, panic attacks, hospital visits and suicidal thoughts, and feeling trapped in a contract with Rasmus Gozzi that forced her to perform, or that she would then be liable for the economic loss of cancelled gigs.
FELICIA’s solo career did, in some way, keep one reference from those Fröken Snusk days, and that is of a somewhat hidden identity. While the facemask is much less hidden than the balaclava look, it serves a similar purpose of keeping some mystery about the artist themselves. And FELICIA wants this mystery, describing that it would be “traumatic” and feeling “scared to be too recognisable” to the general public.
This story though makes the transformation from mask to glasses even more remarkable. Speaking to TV4, FELICIA called just the step of going from masked to spectacled as being “a big step”, and noting that it was the idea that she would, “sooner rather than later”, would be in a position to take off the mask. There’s also a practical aspect to the larger than life spectacle choice – while it still provides some anonymity, it provides another styling choice that FELICIA can choose to use rather than the face mask, and still keep some identity hidden.
We don’t get to see the actual transformation ourselves, with FELICIA’s back turned to the audience in a dark laser-filled arena surrounded by backing dancers, but the transformation appears as FELICIA’s alter ego breaks the fourth wall. It’s not just an invasion of our TV screens, it’s a triumphant look-at-me showcase that millions in Sweden will recognise as a step of bravery and self-empowerment.
The Competitive Success
FELICIA’s surge at Melodifestivalen has caught many pundits by surprise. In part this is because ‘My System’ emerged from a team of Norwegian and Danish songwriters who lack the traditional Melfest pedigree that typically dominates the Contest’s leaderboard. This success is even more remarkable when contrasted with FELICIA’s previous track record; her 2024 appearance as Fröken Snusk stuttered to a fourth-place heat finish, while her solo debut ‘Black Widow’ hit 16th on the Swedish Spotify weekly chart before dropping out the top 50 until FELICIA qualified to the final.
However, the technical brilliance of those three seconds of cinematography has provided the song with an essential focal point, granting it a level of memorability and relatability that is vital for the Eurovision stage. Voters rarely choose based on song alone; they vote for characters, and FELICIA’s transformative staging creates an empowering narrative that audiences instinctively want to support. Without that, this high-risk never been done at Melodifestivalen sound might not have carried FELICIA through to the final with the same momentum.
That said, as we head into the final with FELICIA as heavy favourite, the path to Vienna requires a sharp attention to detail. While FELICIA has leveled up her live look with sleeker techno-variant glasses, the pre-recorded LED backdrop, the very “money shot” of the performance, still features her original eyewear. This visual discontinuity reduces the impact of the fourth-wall break and is the kind of stylistic oversight that I can’t justify in a competition as technically brilliant and big budget as Melodifestivalen is. Hopefully it does not impact on the scoreboard tonight.
FELICIA sporting new eyewear in the Melodifestivalen rehearsal in Strawberry Arena (Photo: Stina Stjernkvist, SVT)
‘My System’ is a masterclass in using modern production to create effects that have never been seen before in Song Contest entertainment. By literally breaking through the cinematic letterboxing of the TV screen, FELICIA has announced on Sweden’s biggest stage her liberation from the shackles of her past projects.
No matter what happens on Saturday, or potentially in Eurovision in May, I expect this televisual technique to be one we are going to see utlilsed much more in the Song Contest’s future. It’s not just using a green screen, it’s using the screen itself to create extra dimensions, to create a heightened feeling of live storytelling, and to create a moment that you will remember even when all 25 songs have been paraded in front of the audience.
Should FELICIA travel to Vienna as expected, I look forward to tens of millions around Europe being equally gagged as I was the first time I saw that effect.