The Danish final "Dansk Melodi Grand Prix" was held on February 11th at the Næstved Arena. The show was hosted by Tina Müller and Heino Hansen. There were two rounds of voting. Firstly sms and app voting would select a top 3, with app voting open before the final and during. Finally a winner was chosen by a 50/50 mix of jury vote and sms & app votes. The winning act was Reiley with "Breaking my heart".
Reiley - real name Rani Petersen - is a Faroese singer & social media influencer who started out posting on Instagram and is now most prominently on TikTok. Most of this posts are of him singing cover songs. Before this he started playing piano as a six-year-old but then left music to train for for gymnastics. However his interest in music returned when he performed as a dancer and singer in his secondary school’s production of Grease. In 2019, he travelled to London and Los Angeles to record music and landed a record deal with Atlantic Records thereafter. His single and debut 'Let It Ring' had most success in South Korea.
Reiley starts alone on stage in front a neon pink heart which, as the song suggests, breaks up as he moves onto the stage proper. He is good joined by two female and two male dancers. They are dressed in jeans and jackets while Reiley's is very much in white and pink. The verse is rather short and have a lot of modulating in and out of falsetto . This is followed by a longer pre-chorus then chorus proper. Here the backing track cuts off and all you can hear is synthesised backing vocals singing the first part of the chorus. The track soon comes back in but is not the main feature. We then have another verse followed by a pre-chorus before another chorus with the track stoppage. The chorus is much longer with the final part with a much stringer backing track. It then slips back into a pre-chorus before one long chorus which ends rather abruptly with a green backdrop with random love symbols.
This is all extremely boring and pedestrian. The only reason the chorus has any impact at all is because of the vocoder. It will be interesting to see if this will even be allowed as you cannot hear his vocal during this pivotal point. He has very little stage presence and actually seems a little overwhelmed by performing in front of a crowd. Talking of the crowd they seemed very underwhelmed by what they were seeing. The subject matter makes it unclappable and the plodding beat makes it hard to wave your arms or your flag to. This flatness really was palpable down the camera. This is actually a shame as the chorus has a really interesting melody but the stop/start backing track is too over the top - this track needs to grow rather had yo-yo backwards and forwards. To make matters worse he choreography of the dancers is poor and dated. The graffiti on the jacket idea just didn't work and for this song is a very bad gimmick.
I don't really know how famous Reiley is outside of Denmark or the Nordic world but if he is then he is going to have no problems getting his followers and fans to vote him in - remember it is now 100% televote in the semi-finals. Ideally this song needs a visual revamp - I mean if he is a TikTok star why not produce the performance so it feels like one of this videos? They are not going to tinker with the song so they need to work much more on the staging and his presentation skills too. This may well appeal to the younger viewers but to those stalwarts who actually watch the semis, most of which are probably of an age where they are not so interested in acts' social media presence - this will not make a mark. I hope and wish for a dramatic revamp but I doubt I am going to get it.
ARTIST - Reiley
SONG - Breaking my heart
WRITING/PRODUCTION CREDITS - Bård Mathias Bonsaksen, Sivert Hjeltnes Hagtvet, Rani Petersen, Hilda Stenmalm
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