67th Song Contest: Austria wants to win this year with bass and message

Gentle, catchy radio pop played by the Ikea family on Sunday mornings at the breakfast table – that’s definitely not Austria’s ESC contribution 2023. The fact that the female duo Teya & Salena will compete in the second semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest this year has been a fact for a long time. But now the song “Who the hell is Edgar?” of the two singers, which will be heard for the first time tomorrow at 7.40 a.m. in the “Ö3-Wecker” on Women’s Day. And Austria is going for bass this year. A hard, danceable disco beat, which should also arrive in Eastern Europe, slightly surreal lyrics with reference to Edgar Allan Poe as a good spirit who takes possession of you, and a clerical choir with the onomatopoeic syllable “Poe” – Teya & Salena don’t start cuddly lard, but definitely make a statement. “I don’t think you can prepare for this song,” Teya emphasized at Tuesday’s presentation.

The background to the lyrics is quite serious, Teya emphasized: “It’s about our experiences as female songwriters. If you speak plainly in a room, as a songwriter you very often have the feeling that you’re not being taken seriously. That’s a clear one difference to my male colleagues.”

“These are our own experiences,” Salena also emphasized in this context – whereby the fate of two young musicians in an environment full of white, old men is also described with a wink in the accompanying video. Because with all the message, the 24-year-old Styrian Salena also made it clear that with the ESC appearance, a childhood dream would come true for her and the 22-year-old Viennese Teya. They try to approach the Sacher in a correspondingly relaxed manner: “It’s only pressure because everyone talks to us about it.”

Stefan Zechner, head of the ORF delegation, emphasized that the new system for finding songs, in which 50 specialist journalists and the international ESC fan clubs were involved, has proven its worth: “Compared to previous years, it was a very open system, not an elitist one Decision.” However, the experienced ESC veteran cannot elicit a prognosis about Austria’s performance this year: “The difficulty is that the song contest is not calculable.”