VIDEO: Leon Of Athens Premieres New XENOS Music Video

London-via-Athens indie pop artist Leon of Athens today follows last Friday's release of his much-hyped third album Xenos with a brilliant video for the title track, "Xenos." Watch it exclusively via Dork Mag. "Xenos" continues Leon's affinity for dramatic, surrealistic, eye-catching, thought-provoking videos; it follows his video for "Utopia," which Oscar-nominated screenwriter Efthimis Filippou (Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) wrote. As works of fine art rather than simply music videos, "Xenos" and "Utopia" showcase Xenos' stunning breadth and vision.

To promote Xenos, Leon of Athens will play his first-ever US shows soon following his half-decade of dominating the European touring circuit and receiving praise from The Guardian and NME. He'll first play Okeechobee Fest Mar 1-4 and then SXSW Mar 12-18. SXSW has featured him as a Showcasing Artist of the Day.

Xenos: an alien, foreigner, stranger, but also an estrangement, a distance. As a global wanderer, an artist of the world, Leon Veremis - aka Leon Of Athens - knows what it is to be a stranger, to a new country as well as to yourself. He shows me a photograph of a sculpture that inspired him called The Immigrant's Void by Bruno Catalano; a man carrying a case, with a gaping hole where his home, his self-assurance and his sense of belonging used to be.

Born in London, the one-year-old Leon moved to Greece with his family, where he spent most of his life immersed in music, studying guitar and piano from the age of six and forming bands inspired by The Clash, Radiohead, Brian Eno, Talking Heads and The Beatles. At twenty he got a scholarship to study music at a school in Los Angeles, but a year from graduation his father fell ill and he returned to Greece to take up music and philosophy studies. After his romantic notion of leading a huge ten-piece collective quickly became unmanageable, he officially became Leon Of Athens, crafting a debut album only released on a small indie label in Greece in 2011 called Future, a lo-fi, multi-instrument collection of amorphous acoustic folk driven by the political turmoil around him.

Inspired by everything from M83, Metronomy and St Vincent to Philip Glass, Plato and the films of Bernado Bertolucci, Global was a worldly evolution of indie rock, merging brass, electronica and the refined melodic guitar pop of Belle & Sebastian or Stars into a catchy, upbeat party record that tackled both frivolous sci-fi on tracks such as 'Baby Asteroid' and the title track ("I like sci-fi movies, technology and there's a series called Black Mirror which is really interesting," Leon says, "I find it really exciting thinking about the future") and the riots and political subterfuge of his homeland on the likes of 'Slow Down'. Gathering him a growing following in Europe, critical acclaim from the likes of NME and The Guardian in the UK and a video for 'Baby Asteroid' by Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos, Global built enough of a buzz around Leon for EMI Records to snap him up and set him on the road to Xenos.

Check out the newly released video!

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