Welcome to the first out of many national final posts this year. I’ll try to cover all proper NFs (i.e. no X-Factor-style artist selections - looking at you, Israel and maybe Georgia).
However, I have to ask: why did they call this “Montesong 2024” when it’s for Eurovision 2025? That makes it needlessly confusing. Czechia called their NF “ESCZ Year” where “Year” was the ESC edition it was for, so we had ESCZ 2024 in December 2023. But I digress. Welcome back, Montenegro. I hope you’re here to stay.
Luckily, this NF only has one show with 16 entries, so this should be a quick one.
We open with two of our presenters talking about Montenegro and highlighting that they also took part in the Yugoslav Eurovision selection, which they won in 1983. Danijel, the singer of their 1983 entry, then does the most obvious playback performance of his song. Then they make some obvious jokes about walking 10 km to school in the snow both ways, referencing the Yugoslav 1984 entry Ciao amore (ngl, based). They continue referencing their previous entries, mentioning Knez and Sergej Ćetković (their 2014 entrant). They actually interviewed the latter, and he’s barely aged at all.
Then we move on, they sing along to Zauvijek moja, which is a lovely throwback. They then invite the director of Montesong who, coincidentally, is one of the members of No Name.
And, of course, we get a reminder of all of their other entries, with a lot of praise being given to 2014 and 2015 for qualifying. At this point, I was starting to get the idea that this wouldn’t be a quick one after all.
There’s a lot of talking I tuned out of after that as I was going through passport control during it. But the intro lasted 49 minutes, jesus christ. Souther Europe really does have an ability to create an extra hour of runtime out of nothing.
While I wouldn’t have minded the opening being a little shorter, Montenegro haven’t exactly had a good track record and they deserve some time to remind other people about their existence. But it was irritating because I had a plane flight scheduled for 21:20 CET and I really hoped they’d be quick about getting through the songs. Anyway, onto the songs we go.
It’s a fairly generic ballad, isn’t it? I can’t say it does anything new or out there. But it isn’t unpleasant: I like the performance and the cosmic background on the LEDs.
She’s a bit of a diva in the good sense of the word. It’s certainly captivating at times, although her vocals lack some impact for my taste. Still, it’s a bit of a bop. And the lighting effects are really cool as well. In a way, it reminds me of Čaroban (Serbia’s 2011 entry) a little.
Dear god, there’s already a break. Luckily, it’s a short one.
It’s a very tropey Željko-style ballad that lacks the same impact his songs have. It’s probably something most people expect from Montenegro, but it completely fails to grip me. But he does have a lovely voice, and I really like the storytelling done through staging: there was a lot of thought put into it, for sure.
I wish we had more metalcore in Eurovision, it’s such an underrepresented genre. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m a huge fan of this because of the chorus. It just completely kills all progression done in the verses and tickles my brain in a completely wrong way. The vocals also lacked impact for my taste, although you can still see that these guys have experience performing on stage. I surprisingly wouldn’t mind this winning.
And dear god, more breaks, now a long one.
This is rather uninteresting, she really did try her best (and I love the synth work), but I get why this was a reserve entry. Also, if she wins, that outfit will need to get changed pronto, it’s quite a disaster.
Oof, this had some potential, but his vocals are very unpleasant to my ears. Also, the staging was entirely incoherent and disjointed, which sucks. It would’ve been so good if it was good.
Ouch, another break. Will they really do them after every other song? Please don’t, it sounds like a horrible idea.
She starts her performance sitting on the floor, which will definitely annoy some people. Otherwise, this is everything I expected from this song. Having a ballad without a beat is always difficult because it can feel aimless, but she is great at setting the direction with her voice. But, of course, it also has a very strong instrumental that really highlights her strengths as a performer.
It also has very lovely lyrics. I don’t understand them all, of course, but I get some snippets and I especially like the part of the lyrics that go “sunce za mjesecem ne ide” (which means “the sun doesn’t follow the moon”), which really shows that these guys relationship is one-sided. It also reminds me of the speech River Song gives in one of the Christmas specials about how she loves the Doctor and doesn’t expect him to love her back (even though she does).
All in all, I’ll be really happy if this wins and I even think it has a shot at qualifying with a stronger staging if the trend of countries sending upbeat songs continues. It just needs to convery its fairytale-like vibe better.
On the other hand, I’m not a fan of this. It’s a pretty generic dancey song with an unnecessary switch to English. Really not my thing.
Nina just doesn’t have powerful enough vocals to pull off something as epic and grand. She’s a little breathy at times, which really ruins my immersion into this song. Luckily, that isn’t critically bad, and it can easily be remedied with some work before the contest. And, to be fair to her, she got better throughout the song.
I also really like the staging, I was afraid they wouldn’t pull it off, but they did, so kudos to them. But I have a feeling that a lot of the hype is simply because people want to avenge Igranka, and she might struggle in the televote.
Damn, these guys are kinda hot. They also really nailed the staging and the makeup in general. Say whatever you want, but this immediately catches your eye.
I actually quite like the song itself. While dropping random English words in non-English songs has gone out of fashion after the mid-2000s, I feel like it became so uncool that it looped back into being cool (but only when done well - which this is). The instrumental break section is great, but it lacks some buildup otherwise. Though I’m not really a fan of the fact that the verses and choruses all sound pretty much identically. But will I still sing “gay ili straight” to myself randomly from time to time? Yeah! I think this would stand a good chance to get a respectable result from the televote.
It’s a little simplistic, but not overall unpleasant. The staging is nice, with the backing dancers actually adding to the song, but the song itself establishes its ideas right away and just retreads them over and over again. But I can’t deny that it’s still quite engaging, and I won’t be surprised if this wins it outright.
Ok, my plane is taking off, I’ll try not to spoil the results for myself after I land so these reviews can stay unbiased.
Welcome back, D-mol. Ok, I’m joking, of course, but there are some D-mol vibes here, and I mean this in a positive way. This is very theatrical and dramatic, with some symphonic rock vibes, and the staging is actually quite good too. There’s definitely a lot of potential here with some additional polish. I would really like to see these guys again.
Ouch. Unfortunately, these are by far the weakest vocals of the night. The song itself isn’t super bad, but the life performance is just painful to listen to. The idea behind the staging isn’t all too bad, but I can’t enjoy it with such a bad performance. Overall, this is a definite no from me.
Ok, this is easily the best rock vocal of the night. It has the right balance of power and grit, the way the performers harmonise works really well, and damn, that instrumental is purely awesome. This truly gets in your face and refuses to back down, so you remember it whether you want it or not. You can also see that these are experienced performers, especially because of the way they behave on stage. I believe that if this wins, it’ll actually qualify since we seem to be getting fewer and fewer rock songs in ESC after Måneskin’s win raised their number for a bit. It’s definitely the most ready entry.
Her dress might be a bit extra, but I actually like it, it looks like an orchid. It kinda adds to the song for me, which is already very pretty. It’s another rather minimalistic ballad, but in a lovely and appealing way. She has a very clear and melodic voice, which I really li- damn, that’s a very elegant costume change, which leads into a short instrumental break where she plays (or rather pretends to play - damn you, Eurovision rules) a violin and the song picks up a little. I definitely don’t think this is a Eurovision qualifier, but that won’t stop me from sticking it on my playlist.
This is very mid-2000s Eurovision and I don’t know if I mean this negatively or not. It’s definitely the campiest song of this NF, which really makes it stand out. Plus, every NF needs something fun like this, to put it right at the end, if anything. It would stand no chances at Eurovision, but I had enough fun with it to appreciate it. She got a lot of negativity for allegedly buying views, but idk, others did that too.
Grading it on a bit of a curve, I found this surprisingly fairly enjoyable. The production was better than I expected from Montenegro, they clearly took this seriously. The selection of songs was decently diverse, though I think the running order could use some work as a lot of ballads and rock songs were lumped together, despite being made by the producers. I’m also not a huge fan of fixed-point voting systems, just do it proportionally, come on.
There was some talking after the last song, then a recap and the voting opened. To prevent vote rigging, they only allowed one vote from one phone number, which is a really good idea, and I wonder why others don’t do this (cough, EBU, cough). Oh, hi, Emmelie de Forest, it’s nice to see you. Yeah, we were treated to her performing Only Teardrops as an interval act, which is fine and all, but really shows how much the staging carried that song back in 2013. It just doesn’t hit the same without the drummers and the golden shower at the end (shush, you perverts). I do prefer her hairstyle here, though.
It’s time for the jury to vote, and wow, it looks like these were randomly generated. Twelve points to the stereotypical Balkan ballad, a 12 to the campy final song, 12p to the awesome rock song from Baryak, finally a 12 to Nina - I guess the juries weren’t too impressed by her vocals as well, a twelve to- hold on, did Tijana just say she made a mistake while voting? She did! She meant to award her 8p to Dva Srca and not Repeat, but voted incorrectly. Wow. Just wow. Imagine if Jon Ola Sand said, “Belarus, you weren’t supposed to qualify today, but one of the Czech jurors voted incorrectly”. Wow. Another highlight includes Emmelie saying “10 points go to, uhhh, I’m not sure I can pronounce the title, but it was a lovely song” and isn’t that an experience most of us had at some point. In the end, Nina was leading, as I expected, but what I didn’t expect was Clickbait in second - it seems like such a jury-repellant song, but it got the same number of 12s as Dobrodošli. The points were converted to the ESC-style 12/10/8-1 points, which I simply dislike - keep it proportional. It really does work better.
It’s televoting time, and wow, they only got 2233 votes - the results are bound to be hilarious (update: the numbers they announced only add up to 3262, so there’s some weirdness going on for sure). The lower points aren’t that surprising (6p to San is cool though). Wow, just 7p to Nina, that’s gotta hurt, but she isn’t out of the running yet. Whoa, 8p to Đurđa, incredible, I take back every negative thing I said about Montenegro in my life, you people are based. 10p to NeonoeN, so they’re now in the lead. Did Milena Vučić buy votes as people said, will she get the 12p and win? No! The 12 points go to Bayrak, who doesn’t win due to his tiny jury score. Wow, Clickbait actually won. It was my winner at first too, until I sat down and listened to the songs more thoroughly. I guess this is a good thing, as most people will vote based on their first impression.
Now, let’s see if Montenegro can get a qualification with this. I could see it going either way, but they’ll definitely need a favourable draw with Croatia and Serbia in the same semifinal.