Belgium are one of Eurovision’s inaugural members, and with 2024 marking their 65th appearance in the contest, only Germany have more appearances (and tied with UK and France). Yet Belgium still only have one win at the contest, that came back in 1986. In the last 10 years, they’ve had a stop-start kind of renaissance, with four top 10 finishes (including a surprise 7th place last year, and two top 4 results) but also a couple of non-qualifications. Up next to try and get Belgium’s second win is Mustii and “Before the Party’s Over”.

---

Like many of this year’s artists, Mustii is more than just a singer, but is also a songwriter, actor and TV personality. He’s played parts in both theatre and TV shows, and was a judge on Belgium’s version of Drag Race. However, it’s as a musical artist that he has arguably been most prolific, with two album releases and several singles. He’s been nominated for both music and acting awards in his career, and he was one of the first, if not the first, Eurovision 2024 artist announced, way back on 31 August, a day before the “official” start of the new Eurovision season.

“Before the Party’s Over” has several songwriters credited, included Mustii himself. It also includes Belgian songwriter, Nina Sampermans who was a co-writer of “Tout l’univers”, the jury winning song of 2021. I’d describe the song as being in the dark pop category. It’s contemporary, but there are some nice 80s sounds/hints in the instrumentation in the early part of the song. It’s sophisticated and unlike some of this year’s entries, there’s a lot of meaning within the lyrics. It’s definitely a powerful song, and one of the most impressive packages this year. My main personal gripe with this is that it does take a while to get to that big build up of the final minute, and then can feel a bit repetitive – but I think staging and performance might mitigate those.

This has done very well in fan polls; at the time of writing it was doing very well in the OGAE annual poll, and it’s high up in the scoreboard app as well. Generally you’d think this was quite a safe bet for qualifying (and the semi only app option shows this), though some (but by no means a majority) have questioned the live vocal/performances not being as strong as the studio version. People do have a tendency to overreact though, and the betting odds are still OK, though I think perhaps not quite as solid as you might have originally expected. Now it’s true the Belgian delegation does sometimes mess up, but I think there’s too much experience for that to the happen this time, and too much quality and performance in the song.

Now, on the basis that Mustii does qualify – can this win? Or at least achieve a good result. On the former, I’m not sure I can see this getting a big enough combined jury and televote compared to some of its rivals; I think some of them are more immediately engaging in terms of capturing televote, and jury wise, there are songs that might be rewarded a bit more than this. However, that still leaves this with a potential to do well, and I think if all goes well, another top 10 result could be on its way.

---

---

Belgium in the Eurovision Song Contest