The best song, by about a mile, to come out of this all this year's Eurovision selections is Spirit In The Sky by KEiiNO. It's been in Popjustice's Big Hit Energy playlist for about a month and, in a rare instance of pop justice in action, over the weekend the semi-ludicrous, 100% amazing pop beast romped to victory at Melodi Grand Prix, meaning that it's now been selected as Norway's official actual entry.
The song— "a story about brave men and women that have fought, and are fighting, for the right to be respected and loved for the person you are" — is a triumph in its own right, but as you can see from the performance below, if you throw in some smoke machines, some lasers, six strictly unnecessary drummers and a load of crowd noise you've got 'quite a moment'.
It's the crowd noise, isn't it? The crowd noise when the first chorus explodes. You simply cannot go wrong with crowd noise. The band should put a new version of Spotify which is just the normal version with crowd noise chucked on top.
In an email to Popjustice last month, Tom from the band explained that KEiiNO's goal "is to make arctic pop-bangers combining joik, nordic folk and camp pop in a synth heavy sound", which he might have just copied and pasted from some existing text but that doesn't matter because but whichever way you look at it that description's just ideal isn't it?
Tom's next email was from "up here in the mountains". He added that the next day the band (Tom plus Fred Bujlo and Alexandra Rotan) would be out in a reindeer sled on the tundra (!), which isn't something you hear from many pop artists. Pictorial evidence quickly followed.
Five points to take away from all this:
- "Arctic pop-bangers combining joik, nordic folk and camp pop in a synth heavy sound" are the way forward.
- KEiiNO are a very good pop outfit!!
- Spirit In The Sky should win Eurovision.