Green Lung make their long awaited return and take us deep into the darkest depths of London with Necropolitan.

GREEN LUNG

There is a particular kind of anticipation that only builds around a band who have never once let you down, and as I sit here with the funeral bell of Necropolitan tolling in my headphones, I’m reminded that Green Lung have spent the best part of a decade quietly building exactly that sort of trust. Four albums deep, the London five-piece have gone from occult-rock hopefuls playing to a handful of the faithful in South London boozers to genuine flag-bearers for British heavy music, and they’ve done it without ever compromising a single riff, a single hook, or a single ounce of the theatricality that makes them so gloriously them.

So, when I tell you that Necropolitan is the sound of a band pushing their gaze away from the mossy churchyards and standing stones of the English countryside and towards the buried, blackened heart of their own capital city, understand that I do not say it lightly: this is Green Lung’s boldest conceptual pivot yet, and it might just be their best record.

A VERY BRITISH STRAIN OF HEAVINESS

For the uninitiated, and if you’re one of them, welcome: you are in for a treat; Green Lung deal in a very specific and very British strain of heaviness. Picture the primal, downtuned churn of early Black Sabbath given a Hammond organ overcoat borrowed from Deep Purple; add the flair of classic British metal and prog’s appetite for the theatrical and the strange; then steep the whole brew in folk horror: wicker men, coven fires, pagan rites half-glimpsed at the treeline, and you’re most of the way there.

What has always set them apart, though, is that they never let the concept smother the songs. Beneath all the occult dressing, Green Lung write bangers. Enormous, singalong, fist-in-the-air bangers. Necropolitan is stuffed to the gunwales with them, and this time the coven has relocated from the forest to the city.

Before we descend into the crypt to examine Necropolitan track by track, though, indulge the fanboy in me because you cannot properly understand where this band have arrived without understanding the road that carried them here. So, let’s take the scenic route through the Green Lung discography first.

THE ORIGIN

Every cult begins somewhere, and Green Lung’s origin story starts in 2017, when vocalist Tom Templar and guitarist Scott Black assembled the band in London alongside drummer Matt Wiseman and bassist Andrew Cave. Their opening statement was the Green Man Rising demo, released that June, and even in that embryonic form the DNA was unmistakable: the reverence for proto metal, the folkloric bent, the sense that here was a band who had done their homework in the record shop as well as the rehearsal room. A Lady Lucifer single followed early the next year, and it was already clear that this was no ordinary pub-circuit outfit — the ambition was baked in from the very first note.

That ambition crystallised on the Free the Witch EP in February 2018. If the demo announced the band, the EP announced their arrival. It landed to instant acclaim within the specialist press, the kind of notices that make scene-watchers sit up, and it put Green Lung firmly on the radar of anyone paying attention to the burgeoning UK heavy underground. The title track alone was the kind of calling card most bands would kill for, all sinister melody and swaggering riff. Crucially, it was around this period that the band expanded to a five-piece with the arrival of keyboardist John Wright, whose Hammond and synth work would go on to become one of the most distinctive weapons in the Green Lung arsenal. You simply cannot imagine this band without those organ swirls now, and it all started here.

LET THE DEVIL IN

Woodland Rites arrived in March 2019, and it remains a landmark. This was the record that took the folk horror sensibility and made it feel like a fully realised world rather than an aesthetic. Songs like the title track and the mighty Let The Devil In balanced doom’s crushing weight against genuinely soaring melody, and the whole thing was suffused with the smell of damp earth and woodsmoke. If you want to know the exact moment Green Lung’s fanatical following began to metastasise from a scene secret into something much larger, this is it. Seven years on, Woodland Rites still sounds like a debut with absolutely nothing to prove.

Black Harvest, which arrived in October 2021, was the sound of a band levelling up their songwriting without losing an ounce of atmosphere. The compact, menacing title track and the surging Leaders of the Blind, the record’s lead single and video, handed them a brace of instant live favourites, while the closing Born to a Dying World proved they could bring a record home with real gravity. A Bloodstock appearance that same year confirmed what the records had been hinting at: this was becoming a very serious live proposition indeed. Black Harvest is, for my money, the album where Green Lung stopped being a promising band and started being an important one.

THIS HEATHEN LAND

Then came the coronation. This Heathen Land, released in 2023, was the moment the wider world caught up. A genuinely remarkable achievement for a band still rooted in the occult underground, and it did so on merit. This was their most expansive, most cinematic, most varied collection to date, a record that took everything they’d forged across the first two albums and pushed it towards its logical, widescreen conclusion.

The layered production, the soaring choruses, the sheer confidence of it all: This Heathen Land was Green Lung swinging for the fences and clearing them comfortably. Even The Guardian, not an outlet famed for its doom coverage, waded in to declare it heavy metal done exactly as it should be. Support slots and festival billings followed thick and fast. Tours alongside the likes of Clutch, Opeth and Unto Others, stages from Roadburn to Download. The band who once played to the converted in the back rooms of pubs were now converting the masses.

A GENUINE CULT BAND

It is worth pausing here to note why Green Lung’s ascent has felt so different from the usual trajectory of a buzz band. This is, in the truest sense of an over-used word, a cult. The fanbase they’ve cultivated is fervent, evangelical, the sort who turn up in home-made robes and treat a gig less like a night out than a gathering of the faithful. A huge part of that is down to the band’s total commitment to world-building.

The peerless linocut artwork of Richard Wells – all woodcut devils and folk-horror foliage has given every release a visual identity as strong as the music, running through covers, vinyl inserts, stage backdrops and merch until the whole thing feels like a coherent, self-contained mythology you can step inside. Add to that a live reputation that has grown from sweaty club shows alongside the likes of Conan and Conjurer into main-stage festival sets and arena support slots, and you have a band who have earned their following the old-fashioned way: one convert at a time, and never once phoning it in. That groundwork is precisely why a swing as bold as Necropolitan feels like a gift rather than a gamble. This is a band whose audience trusts them to go wherever the story leads.

Which brings us, at last, to the mouth of the tomb.

The obvious question after a record as triumphant as This Heathen Land is a brutal one: where do you go from the top of the mountain? Do you make This Heathen Land Part Two, chasing the cinematic sweep even further? Do you retreat to the underground and reclaim your outsider status? Green Lung, to their enormous credit, have done neither. Instead, they’ve done the bravest thing a band in their position can do – they’ve changed the subject.

NECROPOLITAN

Necropolitan is, first and foremost, a record about London. Where the band’s mythology has always drawn its power from Britain’s ancient countryside, the forests, the moors, the ruined churches, the standing stones, this fourth album turns its gaze inward and urban, towards the band’s own birthplace and the layers of death, occultism and buried history stacked beneath its streets.

The title says it all: a city of the dead, a necropolis, and the album takes explicit inspiration from the seven great Victorian garden cemeteries, the so-called Magnificent Seven that ring the capital like a rosary of tombs. It is a masterstroke of a concept, because it does something clever with the band’s whole ethos. Folklore, they seem to be arguing, is not the sole property of wildwood. It lives in the city too: in the abandoned tube stations, the plague pits, the gallows-grounds, the old churches, and older taverns where the stories get passed down over pints. The band themselves have framed the record as both a portrait of nature’s power over the dreams and dominion of humankind and a celebration of London’s occult lore and its heavy music heritage.

They haven’t abandoned folk horror. They’ve simply given it an Oyster card.

THE COLD OPEN

Every great horror film needs its cold open, and Necropolitan understands the assignment. Clocking in at under two minutes, Open the Hellmouth is precisely the kind of scene-setting overture that Green Lung have always excelled at: a short, sharp, theatrical invocation that swings the great iron gates wide and ushers you into the album’s darker, more urban world. It’s less a song in the traditional sense than a threshold, a ritual doorway, and it does exactly what an opener of this stripe should do: it establishes tone, ratchets up tension, and leaves you leaning forward in your seat, desperate to know what’s waiting on the other side.

Green Lung have always grasped that an album should feel like a journey rather than a shuffle of tracks, and by front-loading the record with this piece of pure atmosphere they signal from the off that Necropolitan is to be experienced as a single descent. Consider the hellmouth well and truly opened.

DANCE TO THE GRAVE

And then the fun begins. Dance to the Grave is significant enough to the band that they have named their forthcoming European tour after it is where the album truly kicks into gear, phasing out of the overture’s murk and into something gloriously flamboyant. This is Green Lung operating in full-fat mode: big, rolling riffs that lurch and stomp with real physicality, one of those arms-aloft choruses the band could seemingly write in their sleep, and ghostly organ curling around the edges like smoke under a crypt door.

Wiseman and Ghast lock into a groove that is positively subterranean, all chunky low-end and swaggering momentum, while Black’s guitar and Wright’s keys trade the spotlight with the easy chemistry of players who have logged serious road miles together. It’s macabre and joyous in exactly equal measure, a danse macabre with a genuine hook, and it establishes the record’s defining trick early: however grim the subject matter, this band will always, always make you want to move.

BLACK MAGICK RADIO

Black Magick Radio is the moment the album fully tips its hand, and it’s one of the most purely enjoyable things the band have put their name to. The central gag is irresistible: the sense of spinning the tuning dial on some ancient valve wireless well after midnight and landing on a broadcast you were never meant to receive, a pirate signal from a coven, patched through in crackling mono. Wright’s keyboards run the whole show, less an accompaniment than the presenter of the piece, and the arrangement leans unashamedly into the warm, faintly seasick sway of vintage occult rock. It’s a lesson in letting mood carry a song: further proof that this band don’t simply decorate their music with the occult; they go to the trouble of summoning it. Tune in at your peril.

NECROPLIS RAILWAY

Now this is a concept, and it might just be the album’s beating black heart. Necropolitan Line, the almost-title-track, takes its inspiration from one of the most gloriously macabre footnotes in London’s history: the real-life Necropolis Railway, the Victorian train line that ferried corpses and their mourners out from Waterloo to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Stir in a dose of the 1972 London Underground shocker Death Line, crank the tempo to a band-record 180 BPM, and you have a subterranean rampage that Templar himself has rightly identified as about the most Green Lung subject imaginable. Sonically it’s Motörhead colliding with Deep Purple in a darkened tunnel, all runaway momentum and a filthy, rolling swing, the sonic equivalent of a driverless carriage careering through the tunnels with the brakes long since given up.

The centrepiece is a madcap neoclassical organ-and-guitar duel between Black and Wright that channels the finger-blistering interplay of Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord in their pomp; it is the sort of showboating flourish that lesser bands would fumble, and Green Lung absolutely nail. Breathless, gleeful, and built for the stage. An instant setlist staple. Mind the gap.

EVIL IN THIS HOUSE

The album’s lead single and, tellingly, the track the band chose to introduce this whole new chapter to the world. “Evil in This House” is built on the kind of vast, downtuned riff that sounds like it was quarried straight out of Master of Reality, and it moves with a heavy, hip-rolling strut rather than a sprint. This is the platonic “classic” Green Lung sound, the perfect equilibrium between crushing weight and irresistible melody, between the sacred and the profane.

It plants its feet where Necropolitan Line bolts for the exit, and it is all the more menacing for the patience. The moment that lingers, though, belongs to the keys: a lead synth break that muscles its way to the front and leans hard into the song’s haunted-house theatrics, another reminder that in this band the organ is every bit as much a lead voice as the six-string. As a statement of intent for the album to come, it was pitch-perfect: heavier, groovier, and dripping with dread. There is, indeed, evil in this house, and it sounds fantastic.

TOGETHER IN DEATH

Together in Death is the record’s most patient, brooding moment, at least to begin with. It opens at a funereal crawl, wreathed in psychedelic haze and candlelit gothic gloom that gives Templar’s voice room to ache and swell. It is a gorgeous change of pace, proof that this band grasp light and shade as surely as they grasp a riff. But Green Lung are far too restless to mope for a full four minutes, and the song’s real trick lies in its back half, where the weight and the hooks come flooding back, and a graveside lament is gradually hauled up into something closer to defiance. It’s a song about union in the hereafter: a dark romance, the two of you bound for the same plot and its structural arc, from mourning to defiance, mirrors that sentiment beautifully. A slow burner that earns its eventual payoff many times over.

OZYMANDIAS

Leave it to Green Lung to build a heavy metal banger around a Percy Bysshe Shelley sonnet. “Ozymandias” draws directly on the poet’s celebrated 1818 verse about the shattered statue of a once-mighty king, the pharaoh Ramesses II half-sunk and forgotten in the desert sands, a monument to the vanity of earthly power and a neat thematic rhyme with the album’s meditation on nature outlasting the dominion of humankind.

Musically, it lands at the loose-limbed, good-time end of the band’s range, riding an elastic, bass-heavy groove and hooks that bed themselves into the skull on first pass. What lifts it above simple swagger is the narrative ambition: it has the galloping, story-driven sweep of prime Iron Maiden, using the song as a vehicle to carry you somewhere rather than merely rocking on the spot. “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” has rarely sounded so groovy. It is erudite and enormous at once, a combination only a very particular kind of band can pull off, and Green Lung are exactly that kind of band.

THE SHADOW OF CROWLEY

The album’s oddest and most intriguing turn, and one that creeps up on you over repeat plays. Alostrael (Be My Babalon) wades hip-deep into Thelemic occultism. The title nods to the magical name taken by one of Aleister Crowley’s Scarlet Women and to Babalon, the goddess-figure at the heart of his system and the band lean fully into the ritual theatre of it. The masterstroke is a guest turn from Riley Pinkerton of Castle Rat, whose narration introduces a fresh character into Green Lung’s ever-more-crowded occult universe; it’s a smart bit of scene solidarity that thickens the atmosphere without ever tipping into camp. Around it, the band unfurl some of the record’s most expressive lead playing, threaded through warm retro synth and an insistent, physical groove. It’s the sort of buried deep cut that quietly turns out to be one of an album’s finest hours. Strange, sumptuous, and utterly bewitching.

“To the Gallows Born” closes the record by drawing on the grim history of Tyburn, London’s most infamous place of public execution for the better part of six centuries, and it is a fittingly monumental send-off. Here the band pull out the full toolkit – big atmosphere, a novelist’s sense of pacing and payoff and steer it towards an ending that is grim and grooving in equal measure, and that feels thoroughly earned after everything preceding it. The playing stretches out and takes its time, unafraid to reach for the epic, and by the final bars there is a real sense of complete work drawing its curtains and the buried city settling back into uneasy sleep. As closers go it is exactly right: not a fade but a deep, gallows-humoured bow.

MUSCULAR & IMMEDIATE

After the chart-topping triumph of This Heathen Land, the safe move was obvious, and Green Lung ignored it entirely. Instead, they have made the most physically direct record of their career, one that trades a good deal of This Heathen Land’s cinematic sheen for muscle and immediacy, while carrying a songwriting confidence they’ve been building towards ever since Woodland Rites. And yet, for all the change of setting and attack, it never stops for one second, sounding unmistakably like them. That’s the trick that so many bands over four albums fail to manage: evolving without erasing themselves. Green Lung have pulled it off with room to spare.

What impresses me most, though, is the confidence of the whole endeavour. The decision to relocate their mythology from the countryside to the capital could have read as a gimmick; in practice it’s revealed a whole new seam of stories for the band to mine, and it’s deepened rather than diluted what Green Lung are actually about. The move to a more direct, live-sounding production has stripped away any hint of gloss and reconnected them with the raw physical force that made the early records so thrilling in the first place. And beneath all the concept and the occult dressing, the songs- always the songs are as strong a batch as they’ve ever assembled, from the runaway thrills of Necropolitan Line to the gothic patience of Together in Death to the literate swagger of Ozymandias.

THE RITUAL OF RELEASE

It’s also worth saying a word about the rollout, because Green Lung have long understood that the ritual of a release is part of the pleasure. The singles arrived like clues in a treasure hunt: the Sabbath-heavy dread of Evil in This House, the runaway thrills of Necropolitan Line, the vintage occultism of Black Magick Radio, each one accompanied by beautifully realised videos and just enough lore to keep the coven speculating. It’s a masterclass in how to build anticipation without over-showing your hand, and it means that even for those of us who have had the singles on repeat for months.

Where all this leaves Green Lung is in genuinely rarefied air. Britain has always had a proud lineage of heavy bands who wear their national identity on their sleeves, the folklore, the horror, the peculiarly damp romanticism of it all and on the evidence of Necropolitan, Green Lung are the most compelling standard-bearers that tradition has produced in a generation. They’ve managed the near-impossible balancing act of being reverent students of the past and restless innovators at once, and they’ve done it while remaining, above all else, tremendous fun. In a heavy scene that too often confuses misery with depth, that lightness of touch is worth its weight in cursed gold.

ONE HELL OF A SOUNDTRACK

If the dead really are massing somewhere beneath the pavements of London, then Green Lung have written them one hell of a soundtrack to rise to. Necropolitan is the work of a band operating at the absolute peak of their considerable powers, comfortable enough in their own skin to take a genuine creative risk and skilled enough to make it pay off spectacularly. If This Heathen Land announced Green Lung as one of the most important heavy bands in Britain, Necropolitan confirms it beyond all argument. Buy the ticket, take the funeral train, and dance all the way to the grave. You won’t regret it.

Green Lung: Website

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