As May looms by, the world sets its eyes for the greatest spectacle of motor racing in Indianapolis the yearly edition of Eurovision Song Contest. This edition is already interesting before it launches, with the history behind San Marino's entry, the return of five-time contest winner Luxembourg after three decades and the struggle of Israel participating or not, but let's cut straight to the main point: the contest itself.

During the previous three months, the entries from all participating countries (totalling at 31 currently, which is massive) have been selected via different means like national festivals or internal selections and slowly but steadily made its way to the general public.

While some national festivals can be followed internationally to a certain degree, like Norway's Melodi Grand Prix which has already earned a lot of fame, most of the time we are ignorant of the participants in other countries and so the winner catches us by surprise. And this year, ever since the national festivals started happening, surprises kept coming.

This year's competition is set to be heavily varied in styles. We're quite used to it in the last years, but 2024 will take it to the extreme. Ballads, pop music, rock and a variety of local languages (which is very welcome in times where most participants have directly switched to English) will welcome a new guest to the party: electronic rave music.

Yep, you read that right. The trending music of the 90s was, well, too trending to make it to Eurovision (though honorable attempts were made by some, like the great Kate Ryan for Belgium in 2006) and so it has seen an uprise several decades on. Some countries had been flirting with it regularly, like the aforementioned attempt and the legend Darude for his native Finland in 2019 among many others, but 2024 is set to be the year of the rave.

Austria was the first one to let the world know of it. Kaleen and her song "We Will Rave" paved the way for the revolution (Austria had already presented nice electronic songs in the previous years), which later on led to Finland's entry No Rules! and finally the one to top them all: Netherlands.

As the core of hard rave music in the early 90s, a legacy which they still build upon, they surely couldn't fall behind and showed how they fare in the field they basically created so many years ago. To that end, your Majesty, Paul Elstak, became involved in the creation of Netherlands' entry in the contest, with the sound he himself pioneered but upgraded to the current technology.

I haven't yet listened to all songs, and also not all entries have yet been selected as of this post, but I definitely want to dig deeper into the participating songs because there's surely still something I need to watch. Even outside of this rave music there are incredible entries, like Norway's and Ireland's, so you can never know what's in store.

I'm not sure of how popular the competition is outside the continent, so I'm here to ask you, fellow people of The Land of V: are you following this contest? Are you intrigued by any entry? Share your thoughts and comments here!