We investigate the poles of the retarded Green's functions of strongly coupled field theories exhibiting a variety of phase structures from a crossover up to different first order phase transitions. These theories are modeled by a dual gravitational description. The poles of the holographic Green's functions appear at the frequencies of the quasinormal modes of the dual black hole background. We focus on quantifying linearized level dynamical response of the system in the critical region of

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... e diagram. Generically non-hydrodynamic degrees of freedom are important for the low energy physics in the vicinity of a phase transition. For a model with linear confinement in the meson spectrum we find degeneracy of hydrodynamic and non-hydrodynamic modes close to the minimal black hole temperature, and we establish a region of temperatures with unstable non-hydrodynamic modes in a branch of black hole solutions.