With only a few national finals remaining in the 2018 “on-season”, there are still some notable gaps in the line-up for this year’s contest in Lisbon in May. That’s because a number of countries are keeping their cards close to their chest with regard to their internally selected entries. However, the deadline is approaching, and more and more of those internal choices are now being released to the public. Here are three that have emerged this week already!

Given that “leak” has been the buzzword of the week in the ESC sphere, we were expecting the Austrian entry by Cesár Sampson to have turned up on YouTube by now, since it was apparently being presented to the press today ahead of its formal release tomorrow. Since it hasn’t, however, let’s turn our attention to Austria’s alphabetical neighbour Australia.

2006 Australian Idol runner-up and bona fide local pop star Jessica Mauboy will be the fourth representative to fly the Aussie flag at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “#We Got Love”. Yes, you read that correctly: the song title is also a hashtag. Except they don’t seem to have realised that, well, that’s not how you do hashtags. Unless only the “#We” is meant to be a hashtag, of course, in which case: as you were. Anyway, it’s a pretty good addition to the 2018 line-up – not quite the outright up-tempo pop banger the year needed, but still a damn sight more cheerful than a lot of what’s been selected so far. A fourth consecutive grand final appearance ought to be a formality for the consistently jury-friendly land Down Under.

Like Australia, Belgium is another country whose representative has been known for some time: 27-year-old Laura Groeseneken, known for ESC purposes by her artist name of Sennek. Her James Bond-esque entry for the 2018 competition, “A Matter Of Time”, was released this week and comes with a typically moody music video. Time will tell if the stage version can maintain Belgium’s good record of recent results.

Finally for this round-up, Croatia will be represented by 25-year-old Franka Batelić. She has a bit of ESC history, having participated in Dora 2009 with the song “Pjesma za kraj“. This time she’s been nominated directly by the Croatian broadcaster HRT, and she will sing the song “Crazy” on Tuesday 8 May and – she will hope – again on Saturday 12 May. “Crazy” has some Dora pedigree of its own, being co-written by Franka along with a certain Branimir Mihaljević.