Whoever has been following the European music industry as of late is surely familiar with the iconic Eurovision 2023 and 2024 entrants, Käärijä (artist name of Jere Pöyhönen) from Finland and Joost Klein from the Netherlands. The singers met each other earlier this year, after many fans saw the similarities between them in their musical styles as well as their personalities, and decided to team up and write a song together. About a week before release, the duo started teasing their collaboration on social media. The track, called ‘TRAFIK!’, was released on the 12th of July.
The song opens with an effortlessly cool hardstyle beat that includes the sounds of a car horn repeatedly going off, with what is seemingly a kid yelling ‘trafik!’ before the song dives into the first verse. In this first part of the song, both Joost as well as Käärijä sing in English about being stuck in traffic. It must be noted that their ‘English’ sounds quite poor in this song, which is a trademark for both of these artists. Especially Käärijä was known to struggle with speaking English before he went on Eurovision, and this has become something he’s incorporated in his music and marketing.
The choruses in the song are sung in Finnish by Käärijä. What stands out here is the final line, which goes “Voi kettu, Kuinka ketuttaa tää ketun kettumainen fakin”, which roughly translates to “Oh duck, how this ducking duck traffic annoys me”. Literally, ‘kettu’ translated to ‘fox’ and is a way to downplay the usage of curse words. The post-chorus exists of that same hardstyle beat as in the intro, with both singers yelling out the word ‘trafik’.
In the second verse, Käärijä starts off by rapping incredibly fast in Finnish, complaining about the chauffeurs of the cars surrounding him in this traffic. Joost continues the verse in Dutch, rapping about how the police can’t catch him because he’s smarter than them. The track dives immediately into the second chorus and post-chorus. At the end of the end of this one, the beat stops for a second to make room for a voice-over stating “Who the fuck is mister Klein?”.
The third verse is completely Joost’s, rapping in Dutch one final time in this song. In the second line, he says “Soms lijkt het fijn om rijk te zijn, maar dat blijkt schijn te zijn” – it might seem nice to be rich, but it does not actually make one happy. This is a common theme in Joost’s music, speaking about his career as something that is a dream come true, yet at the same time wishing he’d rather still have had his parents who he lost at a young age. In the next line, he says “boom, boom, met je ouders, babyboom”, with ‘ouders’ being the Dutch word for ‘parents’. He mentions parents and childhood in a lot of his songs. When he’s done, the voice-over says “I don’t understand Dutch, but I love this shit!”.
Käärijä moves the song towards its finale with a last, longer version of his Finnish chorus before moving into one final, way more intense post-chorus with a child yelling out the above-mentioned Finnish lyric. In the outro of the song, the listener can hear the sounds of a car crashing and Joost shouting out “Käärijä, help me!”. In the accompanying video clip, the two men are in separate cars, one green (Käärijä) and the other blue (Joost), which fit the duo’s iconic colour schemes, and the whole sequence ends with them seeing a large ‘black’ hole opening up in front of them.
This track makes for an extremely iconic collaboration between two well-loved artists known for their unique style. It’s quite short, just over two minutes, which makes it perfect to put on repeat and just jump around to. About a week before its release, the two men also performed the song live at Ruisrock in Finland – which works just as well, if not more, than its studio version. Accompanied by hilariously bad visuals spelling out (most of) the lyrics and including pictures of cars and roads, as well as a bunch of fire, the live rendition of this song helps make it the banger it truly is. Hopefully, fans will get to hear them sing together more often, either on Käärijä his upcoming tour this fall or Joost his tour at the beginning of next year.
Written by: Mandy Huibregtsen
Edited by: Nèri Cliteur
