Miriana Conte — “Look What You’ve Done Now”
Despite the singer having a truckload of sass and some nice rhymes, the reason I don’t think this song works is because the instrumentation is flat and uninspired. The beats build but never give you the epic drop you’re waiting for, even when Conte hits a big note towards the end of the song. It’s like the producers decided to put a generic backing track on there as a placeholder while they focused on the vocals and then forgot to come back and give the music some character.

Aidan — “Ritmu”
I have some theories about sub-genres at the Eurovision which I’ll explain in a future post (probably after this year’s contest is over), but this feels like the kind of song which is usually accompanied by lots of dancing. Sung in Maltese with an upbeat tempo, the track transitions to a big “lalalalalala” in the chorus, which is the kind of thing that seems to have a built-in audience among Eurovision fans. If this makes it to the contest (and then to the final), it would be competing with entries like Spain’s “SloMo”. On a different note, Aidan seems to have written a few other songs in this selection, with mixed results in terms of quality.