Leoniden

 MCD proudly presents

Leoniden  
+ special guests

Wednesday, Dec 4^th 2024
The Academy 2, Dublin
Doors 7:00pm

General Admission: €20 including booking fee 

Seeing Leoniden perform live is something you’ll never forget. It’s an experience like no other – wildly physical and intense, communal and cathartic. It’s impossible to forget that surreal amount of ecstatic, happy faces packed in one venue, those bodies flying and backflipping. That massive sound, pure experimental synth madness and in-your-face, circular guitars. Not to mention those wild circle pits radiating nothing but solidarity. Since day one, this incredible live energy has been at the very core of Leoniden’s DNA. It’s explosive, unpredictable, steeped in punk. And it’s what made the Northern-German five-piece get better, louder, and bigger with each year, each new festival summer that came and went. 

Three albums  into their career, they are obviously a huge phenomenon – and yet you won’t find even a hint of strategic streamlining, of shallow mainstream blandness in their approach. In fact, Lennart Eicke, Felix Eicke, Jakob Amr, Marike Winkelmann, and Djamin Izadi couldn’t care less about all that. They’re just not interested in classic mainstream ways of doing things. Instead, they want to stick to their underground roots and dig even deeper, broaden the very niche they’ve created for themselves. It’s still the same subcultural spirit of the early days – and this year, they’re about to take their whole Indie-Pop/Post-Punk/Synth-Grunge approach to the next level – with “Sophisticated Sad Songs”. The kind of songs that instantly manage to transform collective discomfort into moments of shared happiness. 

Here’s the paradox that defines Leoniden: On the one hand, all of their songs seem to be shrouded by a sense of euphoria and elation. They immediately make you want to dance, and they are clearly made for the biggest possible stages. And yet, on the other hand, pretty much of all of these very songs convey negative, world-weary feelings. Lyrical Weltschmerz. Melancholy thoughts just waiting to be drowned in a collective dance frenzy (see above). For Leoniden, making music has always been self-therapy first. A mode of expression, an outlet for excess intellectual baggage, the ultimate vent to blow off some steam – that’s what makes them so intense, so captivating. With this year’s festival season just around the corner, Leoniden are soon going to return to the biggest stages: jumping and climbing and getting hundreds of bodies entangled in giant mosh pits. Following the release of their fourth album “Sophisticated Sad Songs” on August 23, they are going to embark on the massive “Sophisticated Sad Songs – Tour 2024”. Tickets available everywhere (plus via www.leoniden.shop) from April 26 at 10 am (CET).