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Wasted Love by JJ
An early appearance for one of the favourites for 2025. Austria is right at the front of the pack with the bookies, almost neck and neck with Sweden. It’s not hard to see why those having a flutter fancy its chances.
The song has one of the Contest’s most distinctive sounds, and in singer JJ one of its most distinctive vocalists. A countertenor who can scale to soprano highs it’s no surprise to discover he’s an opera singer. The operatics are combined here with darker electronic and dance sounds, building from a gentle start to a frenzied climax. The theme is of unrequited – or wasted – love, evoking some achingly beautiful imagery to match the bleakness of much of the mood. It’s co-written by Teya, of ‘Who The Hell Is Edgar?’ renown, fast becoming a highly successful fixture in Eurovision’s many songwriting camps.
As ear-catching as this is – and it genuinely is a standout – another emerging theme in 2025 feels to be the need to see how entries are presented on stage. There are several entries I feel could live or die on their staging and this is one. A tried and tested pair of hands has been drafted in, Sergio Jaen, who transformed Bambi Thug’s Doomsday Blues from something widely regarded as a cacophony of noise going into the show into one of 2024’s most impressive visuals. There’s a promise of something never done before on stage (a threat that summons up anything from Nemo’s truly impressive spinning disc to Stefania’s somewhat desperate green screen) but of course any surprise is tightly kept behind sealed lips. The video shows JJ both plunging into the depths and levitating above a group of people grasping at him, appearing to try to prevent him from dying. Perhaps this offers us the biggest hint?
My points: douze points!
Photo: Pavla Hartimanova/EBU