SongHunt 2020, our poll series to find the best non-winning national final song of the year, has come to an end: “La-ley-la” by CHАKRАS from the Belarusian has won the grand final!

Based on the votes of our chatters in the #esc chat and supplemented by our editors’ choices, a total of 96 songs took part in the eight SongHunt heats between January and March, followed by four quarter-finals and two semi-finals. The poll for the 12-song final was open for the past week, and the results from that were combined with our chatters’ votes in tonight’s special live chat event to get the following final ranking:

1. CHАKRАS – La-ley-la (Belarus)
2. Dotter – Bulletproof (Sweden)
3. Sara Bajraktari – Ajër (Albania)
4. Erika Vikman – Cicciolina (Finland)
5. Anna Bergendahl – Kingdom Come (Sweden)
6. Indira – You Will Never Break My Heart (Croatia)
7. Iva – Oculis videre (Iceland)
8. Olga Lounová – Dark Water (Czech Republic)
9. Didrik & Emil – Out Of Air (Norway)
10. We All Poop – All The Blood (Positive Song Actually) (Czech Republic)
11. Paul Rey – Talking In My Sleep (Sweden)
12. Tone Damli – Hurts Sometimes (Norway)

This year’s SongHunt was additionally complicated by the fact that ESC 2020 was cancelled right in the middle of the competition, but we were delighted to see that the level of interest remained as high as always – everyone clearly wanted their say in which song was most “robbed”, even if it turns out they wouldn’t have made it to Rotterdam anyway.

“La-ley-la” duly follows in the footsteps of “Nefelibata” by MNTHA (2015), “Helpless” by The Hardkiss (2016), “Petale” by Instinct (2017), “Fără tine” by Dora Gaitanovici (2018) and “Dua ta besoj” by Artemisa Mithi & Febi Shkurti to become our sixth annual SongHunt winner! You can check out the full results of the entire SongHunt 2020 season if you want to see how we got from FiK to here.

And to conclude, here’s the reprise of the winning song and performance. Many congratulations to CHAKRAS and thanks to everyone who voted in our chat and on our website during all the rounds. Even if next year’s national final season looks to be a bit more scaled-back than usual, there will still be plenty of finals to watch, so there will be a SongHunt 2021 – we’ll see you there!