Bulgaria will send DARA to the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, this year with “Bangaranga,” a song that blends pop energy with the kind of folklore roots that helped make her one of the country’s biggest names. The 27-year-old singer and songwriter from Varna was announced for the contest with a track she describes as “a riot” — but “a happy one.”
That choice puts one of Bulgaria’s best-known performers on Eurovision’s biggest stage after a career built at home on radio-friendly hits and television exposure. DARA, whose full name is Darina, said she is from Varna on the Black Sea coast and has been releasing music ever since finishing third on the Bulgarian X Factor when she was sixteen. She later signed with one of the biggest labels in Bulgaria and has put out songs in Bulgarian and English.
Her path has been unusually fast even by pop standards. In 2021 and 2022, she mentored younger musicians on The Voice of Bulgaria, while her latest album, ADHDARA, arrived last year. The project was inspired by her diagnosis with ADHD as an adult, adding a more personal layer to a career that has already produced a string of number one hits in Bulgaria. For readers following the country’s Eurovision plans more closely, the jury points in Vienna will also be revealed by Vladimira Ilieva, in a separate part of Bulgaria’s contest presence.
“Bangaranga” is built around a title that comes from Jamaican slang and means uproar, commotion and a beautiful kind of disorder. DARA has also described the track as “pop music with folklore bones,” a phrase that fits both her training and the song’s staging. She attended the National School of Arts in Varna, where she specialised in folklore singing, and the new entry draws that background into the contest in a more direct way than a standard radio single would.
The link to Bulgarian tradition is not accidental. The song nods toward the kukeri, the ancient ritual in which men wear costumes of bells, fur and animal masks and move through villages at the start of the year making noise to scare away bad spirits. That blend of ritual, movement and loudness gives the entry a local frame even as its title reaches far beyond Bulgaria for its meaning. It is a neat fit for Eurovision, where identity and spectacle often matter as much as melody.
For Bulgaria, the selection of DARA is less a gamble than a statement of intent. She is already established, already known, and already accustomed to turning attention into momentum. The unanswered question is not whether she can sing live or fill a room; it is whether a song rooted in folklore and slang can travel cleanly from Varna to Vienna and still land with the force it has at home.
