Thursday 29 February 2024

The Netherlands 2024 - Joost Klein - Europapa

(Click here if you can't see the video panel above…)

It's been one of the most hotly anticipated songs of the season in some Eurovision circles. As videos began to circulate of the artist commanding massive crowds to leap about like loons to his stadium hardstyle, we all began to wonder if finally we were going to get that massive gurt happy hardcore banger that we've been dreaming of since the eighties! But hold on, some friendly Dutch types told us. The boy Joost is also known for switching it down into some of the most poignant pathos you can ever imagine, so this could have gone one of many ways. And now it's out it sort of did most of them, all in one go. Let me explain.

From the get go it delivered the familiar rattly pianos of late-eighties piano house lunacy, so just as we were riding the build and waiting for the drop… it kinda didn't. OK, let's roll with this. It's still giving us some beautifully silly techno pop bounce, with a smudge more gnarl to the keyboards. Yeah, it wasn't quite what we were hoping for, but we'll certainly take it against the rest of this field. So we were just settling in for the inevitable repetitive playout when BOOM! - it happened.

We're not going to spoil the gorgeous surprise if you've not heard it yet, but boy it was like a joyful punch in the teeth that you'd happily receive over and over again. And then out of the blue, something equally as beautiful happens, but in a totally different way. The last thirty seconds of this song are absolutely streets ahead of anything else in this contest - the issue is, are people going to judge the whole, or just the bit at the start that they vaguely enjoyed before they went back to fiddling with their phones. A difficult call this one, but one that we're very glad is here.

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