Cyprus 2021- Elena Tsagrinou with ‘El Diablo’

The first fully internally selected song has been revealed for Rotterdam with Elena Tsagrinou and ‘El Diablo’.

‘El Diablo’ starts off very strong, but like the devil himself, this is a bit of a false promise. The pre-chorus mamacita stuff is out of place and the ‘na na na el diablo, na na na el diablo’ bridge incredibly disappointing. The song is trying to be a bit too intricate, aware that this is not a genre traditionally pushed by juries and just becomes messy. There is still an excellent, catchy pop song in here, I just wish it was a more coherent 3 minutes.

I am not fully sold on Elena either. It’s hard to know exactly how far down Cyprus’ list of picks Elena Tsagrinou was, with several higher profile artists approached first, and possibly offered ‘El Diablo’. Elena is not as strong a performer or singer as Eleni Foureira or Tamta, but can make a credible match for the song. She’s one of those who looks unrecognisable from one video to another and my main issue here is her styling for this, which is by far the worst and least vote-able I have seen from her.

There should be a re-think here but once you’ve made the press release and video like this, that may just be wishful thinking. Vocally, she’s not the strongest either (evidenced by the heavy autotune on this) although that can be covered up this year more than most.

Semi one is a bit awkward for Cyprus, they’re in that female heavy second half and don’t have the guaranteed points from Greece but there are a few countries who will go for this type of music in there. This should be going through, but if there’s a high bar and the likes of Azerbaijan are on form then this could get uncomfortable for Cyprus.

I don’t think there’s a top 10 here, at this very early stage, I’d say this probably does marginally worse than Tamta. I feel there’s more that can potentially go wrong here although a lot will be decided on the staging.

Personal Rating: 4/10 Competitive Rating: 7/10 Early Prediction: Semi One 6th-10th, Final 14th- 18th.