Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät — translated as "Pertti Kurikka's Name Day" — performed Aina mun pitää ("I always have to") in Semi-Final 1 of the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 in Vienna on 19 May 2015. The song ran exactly 1 minute and 27 seconds. It remains the shortest competitive entry in Eurovision history by a wide margin — more than 40 seconds shorter than the next-shortest, Lys Assia's Das alte Karussell (1956, 2:08).
Why so short. Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät were a Finnish punk-rock band whose four members all had learning disabilities. Their music — a deliberate, raw, unpolished style consistent with hardcore punk tradition — built around short songs with no expansion or repetition. Aina mun pitää lasts two verses, one chorus, and ends. The band did not stretch it to fit the 3-minute Eurovision cap; they performed their full piece as written.
The cultural significance outweighed the result. The band did not qualify for the 2015 Grand Final — they finished 16th in Semi-Final 1 with 13 points. But their participation made Finland the first country to send a band of musicians with learning disabilities to Eurovision. The story was covered by media across Europe and the band became a focal point for discussions about disability representation in mainstream entertainment. The documentary Punk Voyage (2017) traced their Eurovision journey.
Finland's love of the short cap. Finland has the most entries at or under 2:00 in Eurovision history (3 across the modern era). The country's strong rock/metal selection tradition (Lordi 2006, Käärijä 2023, Erika Vikman 2025) tends to produce songs that hit the 2:58–3:00 ceiling rather than the 1-minute floor — but the Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät exception remains an outlier nobody has touched in 11 years.
The 2026 contrast. Linda Lampenius x Pete Parkkonen's Liekinheitin at Vienna 2026 ran 2 minutes 58 seconds — the typical modern Finnish entry pattern. It finished 6th from a pre-show position of strong favourite. The 1:27 record is widely considered unbeatable: the structural EBU rules cap the maximum but do not prescribe a minimum, and modern selection juries strongly favour entries that use the full 3 minutes for radio-friendly arrangement.