Eurovision Song Contest 2025 — when else is a disco dominatrix on the same bill as a tribute to the first dog in space?

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The annual gathering of mayflies that is the Eurovision Song Contest is upon us. Most of the 37 entries will be forgotten soon after this weekend’s final in Basel. But in the meantime, they have their brief moment of glory.

Forebodingly, the UK’s offering is last in the official album’s track listing. Remember Monday are a female trio who have been tasked with restoring tattered British pride after last year’s drubbing for Olly Alexander, who received zero points in the public vote. Their song “What the Hell Just Happened?” strikes a madcap pose with lots of Queen-style tempo changes and bombast, but the results are too twee and musical theatre-lite to live up to the song’s let’s-go-crazy premise.

Recent British failure, bar Sam Ryder in 2022, is treated as a mystifying aberration for one of the world’s pop music hubs. But devising a successful Eurovision song is tricky. Try too hard to craft a Eurovision song and the gaucheness that gives the competition its charm will be lost. But its traditions can’t be ignored either. Over the course of 69 years, Eurovision has evolved its own soundworld, adjacent to but different from the charts.

Too many songs this year are calculated exercises in wackiness and camp. Australia’s Go-Jo lays the smut on thick in “Milkshake Man”, although the song itself is fun in a B-52s type of way. That can’t be said of Finland’s Erika Vikman, who does an exhausting disco dominatrix routine in “Ich Komme”. “Laika Party”, by Ireland’s EMMY, is a duller-than-it-sounds Europop frippery about the first dog sent into space.

Sweden’s entry, KAJ’s “Bara Badu Bastu”, is a jolly ode to saunas in a music genre known as epadunk, akin to Scandinavian turbo-folk. Estonian rapper Tommy Cash has ruffled Italian feathers with “Espresso Macchiato”, a japish novelty-song about the Bel Paese. Italy’s own entry, Lucio Corsi’s “Volevo Essere Un Duro”, is a winsome pastiche of 1970s orchestral rock. The field lacks a standout, but my pick is France’s Louane with “Maman”, a force 10 ballad about motherhood that continues the admirable Gallic habit of treating Eurovision with utmost seriousness.

★★★☆☆

‘Eurovision Song Contest 2025’ is released by Universal Music