One of the good things about not being a leading Eurovision fan site is you don’t have to claim to be impartial. That’s not to say that escgo! would ever take a biased editorial line, but the fact is that we – this site’s authors and the #esc chat community that lies at our heart – do have certain favourites among the national final process. We’re suckers for Festivali i Këngës, we’ll religiously watch Romanian semi-finals (especially if they’re held in a salt mine)… and we are still delighted about Croatia’s decision a few years ago to revive Dora, the preselection format that gave us so many classics around the turn of the century in particular.

Songs from Dora 2019 and 2020 have reached the latter stages of our SongHunt competition – and we expect the same to be true this year, because some great entries were left in the dust as Albina Grčić stormed to victory in Dora 2021 this evening.

The votes of ten regional juries were combined 50-50 with a public vote to form the final result, and Albina’s “Tick-Tock” was a fairly comfortable winner in both. Our chat favourite, “Rijeka” by Nina Kraljić a.k.a. Alkonost of Balkan, had to settle for second place but will surely make a strong SongHunt showing this season. We’ll drink to that.

Congratulations to Albina, who will perform “Tick-Tock” in the second half of the first semi-final on 18 May. And the good news is that our SongHunt 2021 launches shortly, so those losing songs we enjoyed so much in the chat tonight will soon have their shot at redemption!