Tag Archives: eurovision 2025

Cookie Fonster Makes Sense of Eurovision 2025 (Final): My New Favorite Year

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Intro Post

< 2025 Semifinals | 2025 Final

Almost two weeks after the grand final, and my review of Eurovision 2025 is finished! Warning: it’s long as hell.

Introduction

My new favorite year, you say? Yes, indeed so. The song lineup of Eurovision 2025 is nothing short of spectacular: out of 37 songs, there are ten that I’ve given a 9/10 or higher, 17 that I’ve scored an eight or higher, and 23 that are at least a seven. Only eight songs this year are below a five (songs I neither like nor dislike). As is usual in Eurovision, most but not all of the right songs qualified, and thankfully the Big Five and host all sent honest efforts, which makes this an exceptionally good grand final. The one problem: the results of the grand final absloutely fucking sucked.

I usually list the top three in the intro of my Eurovision final posts, but this time it’ll make me feel better to list the top five. The fifth place was predictable enough: Italy with yet another male ballad, but it was more likable than their usual ballads for reasons I’ll discuss later. Now in fourth place came the song I wanted to win: “Bara bada bastu” by KAJ, the first Swedish Eurovision entry to actually be sung in Swedish since 1998. Fourth place would normally be a good result, but it’s a cruel joke when you look at the actual top three.

The third place is incomprehensible to me: a joke entry from Estonia with as little musical merit as “Irelande Douze Pointe” or “Flying the Flag (for You)”. Israel sent a sequel to last year’s “Hurricane” and ran another massive ad campaign, which got them a terrifyingly close second place and even a televote win. I will rant about them exploiting Eurovision soon enough. And as for the winner, the juries think that opera vocals automatically make a song good, so they boosted “Wasted Love” of all fucking songs to the top and gave Austria their third victory. That song winning was a nightmare scenario for me already, but the other top three made for a worse nightmare than I could possibly conceive of.

Now the good news is, aside from the top three, almost every entry in the grand final has something to like about it. In fact, there are so goddamn many songs worth swooning over, I’m not prepared and neither are you. And plus, I am absolutely over the moon about my country’s entry: Germany finally sent a song in German for the first time since 2007, and a great one at that! That might end up being the longest review in the post, but we’ll see soon enough.

And now to discuss the opening of the show, which I watched live in the St. Jakob-Park football stadium for a public viewing, seated next to my mom and her friend. My mother only joined me for Eurovision on the day of the final, just so you know. The show begins with a hilarious video skit where the three presenters realize the trophy hasn’t arrived yet and debate over what to do. As the most comedic of the hosts, Hazel offers to make a trophy from her water bottle and aluminum foil, then drops it and says “at least it doesn’t break”. I love this little jab at Nemo breaking the Eurovision trophy last year so much. Then the trophy goes on an epic journey to the Eurovision stage, soon to be delivered by Nemo themself in the hopes it doesn’t get broken. The entire opening film is humorous, yet it amazes me with the production at the same time.

The opening act is your usual abridged rehash of “The Code” (sure, why not). Then comes the flag parade, set to a medley of dancey Swiss hits and some kickass percussionists. Everyone in the parade is carrying just one or two big flags, but they’re all having fun doing it and many of their personalities shine through. The goofy brothers from Iceland, proud and confident Erika from Finland, the classy guitarists from Italy, modest Zoë from Switzerland, it goes on. And finally enter not two, but three hosts: Hazel Brugger and Sandra Studer from the semifinals, now joined by Michelle Hunziker. No Swiss-hosted contest is complete without a quick introduction in all of Switzerland’s languages, so the hosts do that and then present us the second audience in the football stadium.

For this blog post, I watched the grand final with German commentary done by Thorsten Schorn. My German grandma said she found the commentary on the grand final hilarious, so let’s hope she’s right!

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Cookie Fonster Makes Sense of Eurovision 2025 (Semifinals): Calm After the (Shit)storm

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Intro Post

< 2024 Final | 2025 Semifinals | 2025 Final >

I started this post at my German grandma’s house on May 18, wrote parts of it at various airports and on flights, then finished it back at home! I hope you enjoy it, and you better get hyped for my grand final review.

Introduction

The time of year has come and passed, and Eurovision 2025 has just ended! I was originally going to wait a few weeks to write my review, but the contest had so many results that pissed me off, I decided I need to get my thoughts off my chest as soon as possible. Now the reason the results piss me off is because this year had an absolutely stellar lineup of songs, but not a single one of the top three actually deserved to be there. Two of them are songs I actively dislike, and one I find listenable enough but came from that country—you know, the one that gets a disproportionate amount of votes from their ad campaigns—at the expense of far better songs. But I’ll get into more detail in the grand final post.

Eurovision 2025 was the third edition of the contest hosted in Switzerland, after Lugano 1956 (the first contest) and Lausanne 1989. Four Swiss cities bidded to host (yes, technically the past tense is supposed to be “bid”, I don’t care), and those were Basel, Bern, Geneva, and Zurich. On August 30, 2024, the host city was chosen as Basel (first time in the German-speaking part of Switzerland) and the venue as the St. Jakobshalle: an arena with 8000 seats, and a full capacity of 12,400 when you include the standing audience. I was in this exact arena during semifinal 2, and I have quite a lot of stories from the trip to tell in this and the next blog post. But the main focus of these posts is the songs, not the trip. I will soon start making a YouTube video about my trip to Basel, and it’ll probably be 30 minutes to an hour long. For now, just know I had a fabulous time and the trip completely surpassed Malmö 2024 for me.

The semifinals were presented by a duo of women like last year. As the show points out, we yet again have a brown-haired Eurovision veteran and a younger blonde-haired Eurovision newbie. The veteran is Sandra Studer, who competed for Switzerland in 1991 scoring fifth place and provided commentary in Swiss German most years from 1997 to 2006. The newbie is Hazel Brugger, a TV host and comedian known for her dry wit. A third host, Michelle Hunziker, would join them in the final.

This is the third contest in a row with 37 competing countries. It was supposed to be 38 at first, but that number seems to be cursed. Montenegro returned after last competing in 2022 (and before that, 2019), only to get a dead last place. Moldova was originally going to compete too and even organized a national final to be held on February 22, but on January 22, they dropped out of the contest and canceled the selection, because of the heavy criticism of the entries chosen. A real bummer, because they had had perfect attendance since 2005 and would normally bring something fun to Eurovision.

So in terms of drama, how did the contest compare to last year? It went pretty well actually! I didn’t hear of any feuds between delegations or contestants during the show; it seems like they all got along and everyone was on their best behavior, including the Israeli delegation. In addition, I could tell that Israeli fans felt much safer in Basel than they did in Malmö. Not until the results did anything resembling a shitstorm erupt, but that’s a matter for my grand final review. One other difference from last year is a change to the qualifier reveals sequence: for all reveals but the last, the countries are narrowed down to three before we find out who qualified. I’ll discuss my thoughts on this change later in the post.

Since the German entry this year is a song I properly love, and better yet, a song that’s actually sung in German, I’ve decided to watch all three shows with German commentary. ARD hired last year’s German commentator for the show, Thorsten Schorn. I can tell he’s gradually finding his footing as a commentator and developing his own style that’s a little different from Peter Urban, more actively humorous. I have 11 non-qualifiers to get through in this post. Most of the NQ’s are understandable enough, but one was a major fan favorite that had zero reason not to qualify.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Festival da Canção 2025: The Angry Rock Song Should’ve Won

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Introduction

Now comes the third and last national final for me to review this year: Festival da Canção 2025, a three-week competition to determine which song will represent Portugal in Eurovision 2025. Festival da Canção, FdC for short, is one of the oldest Eurovision national finals, having begun in 1964. It’s as big of a deal to the Portuguese as the Sanremo Festival is to the Italians, or Melodifestivalen to the Swedes. I won’t go into the full history of FdC here, but just know that even though it’s a long-running tradition in Portugal, after years of sending songs that no one really cared about, the contest was completely reinvented in 2017, and that’s how FdC as we know it today began.

This national selection consists of two semifinals (February 22, March 1) and a final on March 8. The semifinals consist of ten songs each, then six from each make it to the grand final. This means I have 20 songs in total to review: 19 fully in Portuguese, and just one in English.

I didn’t watch the semifinals live and instead watched them starting on March 2, right after I finished my review of the German national final. I wanted to start watch the final live, but I was so absolutely amazed at the song that won Melodifestivalen that I couldn’t watch FdC right afterwards, plus I had other shit to do. So instead, I started watching the final on a day I was sick, March 11, then finished it on another sick day three days later.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Chefsache ESC 2025: German-Language Music Does Exist!

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Introduction

Now the time has come for me to review the German national final for Eurovision 2025. It’s titled Chefsache ESC 2025: Wer singt für Deutschland? (Top Priority ESC 2025: Who will sing for Germany?) and it’s organized by none other than Stefan Raab, a German TV host and musician who came back to the screen in 2024 after seven years working only behind the stage. Among Eurovision fans, he’s most famous for organizing the German selection in 2010 which led to their second victory. He has a long history in Eurovision but hadn’t been involved in the contest since 2012. Most of Germany’s entries since then have been boring as hell and got bad results, so the more years passed, the more fans wanted Stefan Raab back in Eurovision. He’s back to Eurovision at long last and he says at every opportunity that his goal is for his country to win Eurovision.

Several of Stefan Raab’s decisions in this show have been questioned among fans. For one thing, the show consists of two heats, a semifinal, and a final, but in the heats the contestants didn’t sing their competing songs. Instead, they all sang covers of other popular songs or their older songs, and the juries selected who should make it to the final based on those performances. Additionally, the jury consists of only four people per show: Stefan Raab himself, his TV co-host Elton who is a music lover but doesn’t make music himself, the German singer Yvonne Catterfeld, and a different fourth jury member each show. The juries eliminate contestants in the heats and semifinal, and in the final, only the televoters decide who wins. No wait, that was changed a few days before the final, so that the juries now eliminate further down to five last songs. That’s pretty annoying because I had mentally prepared myself for a fully televote final.

I tried watching the heats live (February 14 and 15), but the covers weren’t very interesting to me, mostly just renditions of American and British pop songs. I think this was an idea that Stefan Raab insisted on, and the rest of his team didn’t question him at all because they trust every single idea he has. I was going to watch the semifinal live the next Saturday (February 22), but unfortunately that day I had to put down one of my cats. So instead, I watched the semifinal the day after—a good way to take my mind off the heartbreak of losing a pet.

The shows were all hosted by a familiar name to German Eurovision fans: Barbara Schöneberger, who hosted most of the German national finals of the past decade and seems to be the only holdover from the slop pop fests that were the last few German selections. She’s a TV and radio host from Munich, and my mom happens to be a fan of hers because of her observant humor and ability to improvise.

In this post, I won’t review the covers from the heats, nor will I split the songs between non-qualifiers and qualifiers like I did in my Supernova review. Instead, I’ll review the fourteen competing songs in their order from the semifinal, then discuss the show as a whole.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Supernova 2025: An Ethnic Choir Won My Heart

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Introduction

It’s now time for me to review my first national final of the year! I’m not going to watch all of the national selections, oh no, nowhere close. But there’s a few I have planned to watch (see this post) and Latvia’s is one of them! I don’t know much about the prior Latvian selections, but I do know that this one has a higher than usual portion of songs in Latvian (5 out of 20 fully in Latvian,* 2 in a mix of English and Latvian), which is really cool because I know very little about the language and look forward to getting more acquainted with it. I also know that Latvia got a big confidence boost in Eurovision after Dons brought them to the grand final for the first time since 2016, which is why I chose to watch this selection.

Supernova 2025 was originally going to have 20 songs compete, but “Monster” by Grēta was withdrawn because the singer was sick. The semifinal took place on February 1, and ten songs qualified to the grand final on February 8. I’m not just going to review the songs, but I’ll also rank them with a list at the end! I plan to do this for every Eurovision-related blog post I do from here on out.

Spoiler alert: there’s one song from the selection that I immediately fell in love with the moment I first heard it. I have been listening to that song over and over again for the entire past week.

* OK, technically “Ramtai” has a tiny bit of English.

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My plans for pre-show posts on Eurovision 2025

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In case you guys didn’t know, I will be going to Basel for Eurovision 2025! I’ve already pre-registered for tickets this year, so let’s hope I’m able to get some. Since this is my third time following Eurovision live, my plan was to do something different this year and not spoil myself on any of the songs. But upon further consideration, I’ve decided I will watch a small handful of national finals this Eurovision season, and write blog posts about three of them. This will inevitably mean I will spoil myself on four entries for 2025, and leave myself unspoiled on the other 34.

The first national final I’ll review is Latvia’s Supernova 2025 (semifinal February 1, final Feb 8). The 20 songs for this selection are already out and I’ve heard so many good things them that I figured, why not watch the show live? Dons brought Latvia to the grand final for the first time since 2016, which seemed to give them a big confidence boost for next Eurovision. Their selection has seven songs in Latvian, which is pretty awesome because the last few selections only had one or two each. It’ll be a good way to get acquainted with a language I know very little about.

The second selection for me to review is the big one: Chefsache ESC 2025: Wer singt für Deutschland? Stefan Raab, the man who organized Germany’s selection in 2010 which led Lena to win Eurovision, is back from a nine-year retirement from the TV screen and is intent on giving Germany their third Eurovision victory. I’m absolutely stoked to see what he has cooked up and excited to describe what the national final was like for those who don’t speak German. The heats are on February 14 and 15, the semifinal is on Feb 22, and the final is on March 1.

And the third national final that I’ll review is Portugal’s Festival da Canção (semifinals Feb 22 and Mar 1, final Mar 8). The reason I plan to watch that one is simple: because I trust Portugal. I also plan on watching the final of Sweden’s Melodifestivalen 2025 on March 8, but I don’t plan to write a blog post about it.

I’ve started to really miss writing Eurovision reviews since I finished reviewing the 2024 contest, so these blog posts will be a nice way to continue writing music reviews. Hopefully I can make them interesting even for those who didn’t watch the selections.