SongHunt 2019, our season-long poll series to find the best non-winning national final song of the year, has come to an end: “Dua ta besoj” by Artemisa Mithi & Febi Shkurti, from the Albanian preselection Festivali i Këngës, has won the grand final!

Based on the votes of our chatters in the #esc chat and supplemented by our editors’ choices, a total of 96 songs took part in the eight SongHunt heats between January and March, followed by four quarter-finals and two semi-finals. The 12-song final was open for the two weeks during and after ESC 2019 itself, and over the past week we have been eliminating one song every day until we got to tonight’s six superfinalists.

In a special event in the chat, our chatters voted in three rounds. Firstly, they chose their favourite of the three lowest-scoring songs from the public vote, which resulted in “Tower Of Babylon” by Lorena Bućan going forward to the next round (with Battista Acquaviva‘s “Passiò” and Electric Fields‘ “2000 And Whatever” dropping out). Next, the four remaining songs were whittled down to two, which meant we said goodbye to Lorena Bućan as well as “En livredd mann” by Mørland.

This resulted in a final head-to-head between Artemisa & Febi and Aly Ryan‘s “Wear Your Love”. In a clear and unequivocal verdict, “Dua ta besoj” took the victory and was duly crowned the winner of SongHunt 2019!

It duly follows in the footsteps of “Nefelibata” by MNTHA (2015), “Helpless” by The Hardkiss (2016), “Petale” by Instinct (2017) and “Fără tine” by Dora Gaitanovici (2018) to become our fifth annual SongHunt winner! You can check out the full results of the entire SongHunt 2019 season if you want to see how we got from FiK to here.

And to conclude, here’s the reprise of the winning song and performance. Many congratulations to Artemisa Mithi & Febi Shkurti and thanks to everyone who voted in our chat and on our website during all the rounds – we look forward to seeing which songs become our favourites when SongHunt rolls around again in 2020!