Green Lung have always felt like more than a collection of massive riffs. Every album opens a doorway into a world of folklore, horror, forgotten history and the overwhelming power of nature. Their music can hit immediately as traditional British heavy metal and hard rock, but there is always another story waiting beneath the surface.
I have been listening to Green Lung since around the release of Black Harvest, and I had previously hoped to catch up with vocalist and storyteller Tom Templar during the This Heathen Land cycle. That conversation never quite came together, so finally getting the opportunity to sit down with Tom ahead of the band’s fourth album felt long overdue.
Arriving September 11 through Nuclear Blast Records, Necropolitan is Green Lung’s love letter to Gothic London. Built around the city’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries, its occult underground, lost railway lines and heavy music history, it is also an album about mortality, environmental collapse and the futility of humanity trying to dominate the natural world.
It might be Green Lung’s most vividly realised world yet, but as Tom revealed during our conversation, parts of that world have been waiting inside him for years.
Somewhere Between A Story Book And A Song
Before entering the cemeteries of Necropolitan, I took Tom back to his earliest core musical memories.
A burned copy of System Of A Down’s Toxicity became his gateway into metal at around ten years old. Before that, family drives to the coast were soundtracked by a cassette of 1960s hits, including the melodramatic teenage tragedy and death songs of that era. His first concert would eventually be Judas Priest on the Angel Of Retribution tour.
Looking back, the common thread was not simply heaviness. It was storytelling.
Tom described himself as a bookish child who collected unusual mushrooms and bones, tried to build his own museum and made horror movies with his brother. He originally imagined becoming a writer and did not begin seeing himself as a musician until much later.
“The truth is that I’m somewhere in the middle of both. I’m not really a writer, and I’m not really a musician. I’m in this kind of weird midpoint.”
That meeting point between music and writing has become central to Green Lung. The songs deliver the riffs, hooks and organs that can shake a venue, while the lyrics invite listeners to explore the histories and imagined worlds behind them.
As someone who also grew up writing horror stories and losing myself in books, that part of Green Lung has always connected with me. You can throw one of their records on and simply crank it, but if you want to dig deeper, every album offers another path to follow.
A Love Letter To The London Beneath London
The members of Green Lung grew up in rural parts of England before eventually finding one another through London’s heavy music community. Tom grew up in Norfolk, while guitarist Scott Black came from Devon. As teenagers obsessed with heavy music, finding enough like minded musicians to form a functioning band was not always easy.
London changed that.
The venues, pubs, record shops and people surrounding its underground scene gave Green Lung a place to form their identity. With the band approaching its tenth anniversary, Necropolitan became a way of looking back at the city that brought them together before moving into their next decade.
The foundations of the album, however, reach even further into Tom’s past.
While at university, he attempted to write an occult novel influenced by Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Alan Moore’s From Hell. The unfinished story included London’s seven great Victorian cemeteries and the Necropolis Railway. The novel ended up sitting unseen in a desk for years, but the research never disappeared.
That abandoned project is now part of the soil from which Necropolitan has grown. It is a reminder that creative work is not necessarily wasted just because it does not become what we first imagined. An idea can remain dormant for years before finding the form it was always meant to take.
After audiences embraced the storytelling woven through This Heathen Land, Tom felt confident enough to push those qualities even further. Rather than relying on the usual Jack the Ripper imagery and familiar Victorian clichés, he wanted to explore a stranger and more authentic London.
“London’s so often done badly by metal,” Tom explained. “London’s much weirder and more interesting than that, if you have a bit of a dig.”
Doom Always Needs An Issue Of Doom
The Magnificent Seven cemeteries were created during the Victorian era as grand monuments to wealth, reputation and permanence. When the private companies operating them eventually collapsed, those carefully controlled spaces were reclaimed by ivy, moss and wilderness.
It is difficult to imagine a more fitting image for a band called Green Lung.
Human beings attempted to build permanent monuments to their importance, yet nature eventually swallowed them. That tension sits at the heart of Necropolitan and connects the album to the environmental concerns running throughout Green Lung’s wider body of work.
“For me, doom always has to be about an issue of doom.”
Tom does not describe Green Lung as a straightforward doom band. He sees them more as a hard rock band carrying an aspect of doom, much like Black Sabbath before them. The darkness needs to represent something tangible.
For Green Lung, that darkness increasingly comes from environmental degradation and a society built around trying to transcend the limits of humanity rather than accepting that we are part of the planet’s ecosystem.
Tom drew a striking parallel between older religious promises of a better existence beyond this world and the modern technology industry’s pursuit of limitless progress. Both can become excuses to consume and destroy the world we already inhabit.
That gives the cemeteries of Necropolitan a meaning beyond their Gothic beauty. They become monuments to the same mistake humanity continues to make: believing power, wealth and technology can somehow place us beyond nature, history and death.
Capturing The Band Green Lung Had Become
The concept may be carefully constructed, but musically Green Lung wanted Necropolitan to feel immediate, physical and alive.
Working with producer Tom Dalgety, the band entered Rockfield Studios after gaining years of experience on the road. Tours with Unto Others, Clutch and Opeth had transformed them from a group that spent its early years trapped in pandemic conditions into a tight and confident live band.
For the first time, Green Lung recorded the drums, bass and rhythm guitars together in the room. Tom also completed all his vocals at Rockfield, allowing the entire album to be recorded in just nine days.
The method captured something the band had always wanted but had not previously possessed the time, budget or experience to achieve.
Tom remains proud of the earlier records, but he can hear where they were assembled piece by piece. Necropolitan offers what he considers a more truthful representation of Green Lung as a working band.
“Necropolitan is another Green Lung album. It’s not, like, a wholesale reinvention. It’s almost like a doubling down on something.”
That decision was important after the increasingly expansive production of This Heathen Land. Rather than climbing further towards something overly polished, Green Lung chose to return to a rawer foundation.
The songwriting could still grow more ambitious, but the sound needed to retain the energy of five musicians playing together. It is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is Green Lung recognising that years on the road have become one of their greatest strengths and finally allowing that experience to shape the record.
A Haunted House Opens The Door
“Evil in this House” was the first song written for Necropolitan and eventually became the first single released from the album.
Inspired by the notorious haunting of 50 Berkeley Square and the 1973 film The Legend Of Hell House, the song began taking shape as early as 2024. Tom remembers working on it while Green Lung were travelling to Greece and singing ideas to Scott in an airport.
The song became an early test of whether the London concept could carry an entire album. It offered familiar Green Lung foundations while introducing some of the stranger details of the new record, including its supernatural synth solo.
That combination made it a natural first single. It reassured listeners that Green Lung had not abandoned their identity while offering a glimpse of the more unusual elements waiting throughout Necropolitan.
Singles remain a complicated subject for Tom because Green Lung do not approach their records as collections of disconnected tracks.
“We’re an album band. These albums are designed to be listened to as an album.”
I could not agree more. Green Lung’s records deserve to be played from beginning to end. Each song can stand by itself, but the complete journey allows the atmosphere, themes and stories to build like a collection of connected horror tales.
All Aboard The Coffin Train
Few pieces of London history feel more perfectly suited to Green Lung than the Necropolis Railway.
Created to transport the dead from London to Brookwood Cemetery, the railway carried coffins in first, second and third class. Even death, apparently, could not free the British from their class system.
That strange historical detail became the foundation of “Necropolitan Line”, one of the album’s most energetic tracks. Musically, the band wanted a “Highway Star” style workout built around the relationship between guitar and Hammond organ. The train gave them the perfect vehicle.
“If we’re ever going to do a song about a vehicle, it’s going to be about a coffin train.”
Tom’s imagination also expands the real railway into something more supernatural. Within the album’s world, the cemeteries could be connected through hidden passages, with a hellish counterpart to the London Underground carrying the dead beneath the city.
It captures what Green Lung do so well. A genuine piece of forgotten history becomes the entrance to a larger imagined world, and the listener is invited to complete the picture.
Could Necropolitan Bring Green Lung To Australia?
As our time together began to run out, I had to raise the question Australian Green Lung fans have been asking for years: when are we finally going to see the band Down Under?
There are already personal connections. Green Lung keyboardist John Wright is married to an Australian, and according to Tom, the band is desperate to make both Australia and New Zealand part of its future.
Previous attempts came too early in Green Lung’s development to make the numbers work, but the possibility now feels far more realistic.
“It’s gone from being like, ‘That’ll never happen,’ to a, ‘Hey, that might happen.’”
Tom also sent his love to Australian listeners and shouted out Radio Birdman, AC/DC, Rose Tattoo and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard among the Australian artists he admires.
There is nothing confirmed yet, but the Necropolitan cycle could bring Green Lung closer than ever to an Australian debut. Hopefully, the coffin train can find a route all the way Down Under.
Necropolitan Track List
- “Open the Hellmouth”
- “Dance to the Grave”
- “Black Magick Radio”
- “Necropolitan Line”
- “Evil in this House”
- “Together in Death”
- “Ozymandias”
- “Alostrael (Be My Babalon)”
- “To the Gallows Born”
Necropolitan will be released on September 11, 2026, through Nuclear Blast Records.
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