2 Shkodra Electronique - Zjerm (2025, 8th)

It’s really a wrench to not give this first place and I’m sure I’ll prefer it to many of my country winners to come. Everything that’s great about Albania at Eurovision came together on this truly electrifying song, right from the distinctively Balkan opening riff. I love the melody, the vocals, the beat and the darker spoken section. It achieved a good overall result of 8th though was dragged down from 5th in the televote by the juries ranking it 16th. Just what objective criteria were they marking it down on, as it’s flawless to me?

1 Rona Nishliu - Suus (5th, 2012)

Rona wrote this herself based on an Albanian folk ballad. It’s an unusually structured song with a bridge of taking the place of a second verse. Most pop vocal parts sit relatively low in the female voice, but here the chorus is very high and the bridge even higher. Rona belts out this chorus with every fibre of her body and you can hear the crowd almost gasping as she reaches the climax. And who needs frivolous things like staging when your performance is this arresting, her unusual outfit and hairstyle being the main visual elements. It’s still Albania’s best result, though even the 5th place didn’t do this masterpiece justice, and I doubt we’ll ever see anything quite like it on the Eurovision stage again.

The music is just as ravishing as the vocals. Incredible.

I really like Albania from 2008.

Suus was never one I enjoyed on a personal level but I do admire it, the vocal and the performance.

Zjerm is epic in every way and I have no idea what those juries were doing with it. I believe many individual jurors actually ranked it last (why would you, how was it the worst song objectively last year?) which dragged it down a lot.

I have a soft spot for Identitet as I said before, nice to see it top five, it's very melodic I think with good production and vocals.

4 minutes ago, gooddelta said:

Suus was never one I enjoyed on a personal level but I do admire it, the vocal and the performance.

Zjerm is epic in every way and I have no idea what those juries were doing with it. I believe many individual jurors actually ranked it last (why would you, how was it the worst song objectively last year?) which dragged it down a lot.

I have a soft spot for Identitet as I said before, nice to see it top five, it's very melodic I think with good production and vocals.

I think the jury always consists of people who can be manipulated, honestly, especially this year’s results showed me that. So…