Mystery surrounds Circus Mircus. Even though they’ve been around since 2020, the band members use pseudonyms — although it’s believed that members of Young Georgian Lolitaz (Georgia’s 2016 representatives at Eurovision) make up the core of this group. They were internally selected early in the season and released a short video which suggested they were aiming to live up their lively name.

As it happens, the last time Georgia qualified for the final also was 2016, where the Lolitaz performed a song heavily influenced by British psychedelic rockers Primal Scream. They received 12 points from the United Kingdom jury and finished 20th. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that “Lock Me In”, the best chance they’ve had at qualification since then, certainly has some influences from British music. The chorus has a strong Britpop vibe, although the rest of the song is closer to Madchester. So let’s just say the UK in the 1990s.

Much I like this song, this is one of those entries where the staging will be crucial. There are parts where the track is overly repetitive: it’s just about bearable in the studio version, but live on stage they’re going to have to be doing something interesting to distract the audience from this repetition. The juries probably won’t like it, so the televote will have to help them out if they’re going to get over the line and qualify. In their semi-final, only Serbia and San Marino match them in quirkiness, and it’s not the same kind of quirky, if that makes sense. This feels like an 8th-12th kind of song.