The Greek song was revealed on March 12th via the premiere of the official music video on youtube. At the end of January the Greek broadcaster ERT, announced that Victor Vernicos had been internally selected as their representative. However due to a legal challenge over the transparency of the internal selection and the Greek rail tragedy the premiere was put off longer than expected. The song he will be singing is "What they say".
Victor Vernicos Jørgensen was born in Athens to a Danish father and a Greek mother. He started piano lessons at the age of four, singing lessons at eight, guitar lessons at ten and began writing his own songs at the age of eleven. He has also been overseeing the production of his own music, attending Music Technology courses. Most of this releases have been in English. In 2021 he released his first song in which he wrote music, lyrics but also produced it himself and has been taking voice and performance lessons with Nina Lotsari. He is set to be Greece's youngest Eurovision representative ever.
The song starts with Victor singing the first verse over the top of an atmospheric strumming guitar. As it runs into the pre-chorus a similarly atmospheric piano comes in too. The chorus is much more motivating and the drum beat comes in at almost double time, Victor's voice also goes from croaky and low to something a bit more open and tuneful. The driving beat continues through verse two but comes out again during the pre-chorus. There then begins two back-to-back choruses. The first starts with the atmospheric guitars then the slightly low down beat. The second has a stompy 'we will rock you' clap-along vibe to the finish.
This song has some contemporary appeal. His voice, especially the lower parts, is reminiscent of George Ezra while the music of the chorus takes a lot of influence from "Castle on the hill" by Ed Sheeran. I almost feel like this song would normally stand out as a Eurovision entry as well as be something that could easily be slipped in on any contemporary radio station. It is a little unclear from the video how much personality is going to come through to the tv screens - especially in the 100% televote semi final. Most of the video is spent sitting down, bending over, looking away from the camera and being a little too over-expressive in the arms. Finally, his main video outfit with the boots and shorts seems a rather odd choice.
There are, unfortunately for Victor, already a glut of male guitar-led ballads at this year's contest and with this one being one of the last to reveal, I am feeling some fatigue. To stand out betwixt all the other ballads and rock entries will require a lot of thought; to their credit Greece does have a decent record of providing interesting staging. I feel like this needs to go fully introvert until the final minute where it can kind of explode. I also hope he can actually emote clearly down the camera to the point where he doesn't effect his vocals. On the track they seem very produced and I will be very interested to see how this song sounds and feels with live vocals. If he is very good, I would love even more to see a pared down approach in order to show this off.
ARTIST - Victor Vernicos
SONG - What they say
WRITING/PRODUCTION CREDITS - Vaggelis Gialamas, Kostas Kalimeris, Steve Sovolos, Victor Vernicos Jørgensen
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