The Green Lung Necropolitan album arrives on 11 September via Nuclear Blast, and on the evidence of what the band have put together across nine tracks of occult-drenched heavy metal, it may well be the most fully realised thing they have ever done.
That is a considerable claim. The south London band have spent the better part of a decade building one of the most coherent and compelling bodies of work in British metal. Their three prior albums (Woodland Rites (2019), Black Harvest (2021) and This Heathen Land (2023)) each arrived with critical momentum behind them, and according to Green Lung’s official site, This Heathen Land landed at number one on the UK’s Official Rock and Metal Album Chart. Necropolitan, then, is the work of a band who already know what winning feels like and are now trying to go somewhere further.
Nine tracks, no filler: the Green Lung Necropolitan tracklist in full
The record opens with Open the Hellmouth and moves through Dance to the Grave, Black Magick Radio, Necropolitan Line, Evil in this House, Together in Death, Ozymandias, Alostrael (Be My Babalon), and closes on To the Gallows Born. Nine songs. No interludes, no ambient padding. The band are too confident in their material to need any of that.
Every track pulls from London’s grimier mythology. Dance to the Grave takes aim at the kamikaze greed of tyrannical tech giants and bloated billionaires. Black Magick Radio reimagines pirate radio as a conduit for supernatural malice, the treacly organ tones giving it an FM warmth that makes the sinister undertow hit harder. Necropolitan Line runs zombies through the Tube network in tribute to the London Necropolis Railway, which once transported the city’s dead out to the suburbs. And if you want a precedent for the scale of the closer, To the Gallows Born evokes Iron Maiden’s Hallowed Be Thy Name, though the execution is Iron Maiden country only in ambition; the sound is unmistakably Green Lung’s own, all shimmering Mellotron and pastoral harmonies.
Ozymandias, meanwhile, draws on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse for something esoteric and wide-open, proof that the band’s frame of reference extends well beyond the genre’s usual haunts.
A band built for stages bigger than the ones they’re playing
Green Lung have already toured internationally alongside Clutch, Opeth and Unto Others, and have played festival stages from Roadburn to Download. The live reputation is established. What Necropolitan does is consolidate the argument that they belong on headline slots, not support ones.
Frontman Tom Templar has rarely sounded this commanding. Keyboard wizard John Wright remains a perpetual source of textural audacity, and Scott Black makes another bid to be the most inventive six-string maverick of his generation. The rhythm section carries its own weight throughout, these are not tracks that coast on riff alone.
The songwriting on Green Lung Necropolitan is where everything lands. Great riffs are almost table stakes at this point; what separates the album is the nuance in the arrangements. The symbiotic relationship between the band’s music and the artwork of illustrator Richard Wells continues here, the visual and sonic identities locked so tightly together that it is hard to imagine one without the other. It all chimes with a very real contemporary appetite for authenticity in heavy music.
The album’s concept draws on London’s hidden geography and immortal antiheroes, the city’s dark, otherworldly corners mapped out in song. There is something specific about the way Green Lung use place, not as backdrop but as subject. The London Necropolis Railway, the Tyburn gallows, the pirate radio dial: these are real things rendered strange, which is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds.
For anyone who has been watching the band’s trajectory since Woodland Rites, Necropolitan feels like the moment the ambition and the execution finally reach the same altitude. Necropolitan is out 11 September via Nuclear Blast.
