Photo by Andy Ford | Written by Jon Garcia 

“I want every album to feel like a debut album in some ways because I don't want to just rely on the same old thing,” says Green Lung vocalist Tom Templar.

The London heavy metal troupe have honed their musical storytelling since their 2018 EP Free the Witch, before breaking through with This Heathen Land in 2023, their Nuclear Blast debut. The album traversed occult Albion, taking listeners across haunted farrows of rural England with rippers like “Hunters in the Sky” and “One For Sorrow”.

Now, their upcoming fourth studio album Necropolitan takes their blend of classic metal, doom, psychedelia and folk horror a step further by turning their gaze on their home city.

“I was really keen on exploring occult London,” Templar says. “This Heathen Land was a love letter to growing up in the country, this album's a love letter to London. Necropolitan is a kind of tribute to the city that got us where we are.

“This is a city of stories and ghosts and magic and weird shit.”

 

Green Lung’s fourth studio album takes listeners on a tour of the overgrown and crumbling Seven Cemeteries surrounding London. By way of possessed title track Necropolitan Line – a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride meets Dragula adventure based on a real railway that transported corpses beneath the city – the record tells tales of death, haunted houses, occult radio broadcasts and Aleistaire Crowley’s forgotten muse Alostrael.

Along the way, the band – consisting of Templar, guitarist Scott Black, bassist Joseph Ghast, keyboardist J.G. Wright and drummer Matt Wiseman – have sheared the fat off every song, delivering their hardest-hitting and most instant material yet, all while stepping into the limelight of Britain’s sterling lineage of heavy bands.

KNOTFEST’s Jon Garcia spoke with Templar about the impact of This Heathen Land, how Necropolitan was influenced by their extensive touring, finding Green Lung’s voice through storytelling, and why the band insists on going over the top with friend and artist Richard Wells to give fans an unrivaled vinyl experience.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KNOTFEST: When you look back at the journey that was This Heathen Land, what sticks out most in your mind?

TOM TEMPLAR: It was a transformative record, for sure. A big coming of age album as silly as it sounds, because it was our third record. But the first two, as much as I love them, it felt like we were all part-timers until This Heathen Land.

The big shift was going from thinking of ourselves not as a niche, stoner doom band, but just more as a big, hard, heavy British rock band more simply.

It was the album that made us a live unit. We did a shit ton of touring off the back of that record; a bunch of dream festivals. That was the first time we’d done a sustained live run of that kind of caliber. Also just being out on the road playing with a bunch of great bands. We’ve played with Clutch and Opeth. We did a U.S. tour with Castle Rat. We toured Europe with Unto Others. We just got a lot of road miles learning how to be a band that can fill a room that size and perform.

 

That album we wrote quite ambitiously in the studio, but then we had to learn to play it live. It was a good leveling up album in that way. We kind of overstretched ourselves and had to catch up as musicians just on the road doing every night. That made us a lot of tighter of a band.

It all culminated in headlining Desert Fest in London in April, which was like a big homecoming for us. It was really the peak of our expectations when we started the band at Desert Fest nine years ago.

It’s interesting to hear that it was your coming of age record. Like you know who and what Green Lung is and you know where to look going forward.

TT: It changed in my head going from just being the front man to thinking about the storytelling a lot more. Taking that more seriously and seeing that as the fun of it, in a way. Thinking about the voice of the band. What makes something a Green Lung song? That sort of opens you up creatively. You’re creating almost a feedback loop with yourself and the fans. You don't really know what you're doing in those early years of the band, but once you've been doing it for so many years you start to trust your instincts.

There's so much stuff about the humor of Green Lung, or the mix of super melodic, harmonized hard rock with the more doomier, edgier stuff. It's stuff we used to doubt, and now I fully lean into it. That's what makes Green Lung.

Woodland Rites and Black Harvest certainly have their own really distinct flavor, but Heathen Land got me excited about the storytelling potential. Now looking forward to the next 10 years of the band, that's what gets me up in the morning and makes me want to write lyrics and work on songs.

 

To that point, Necropolitan feels like an extension of This Heathen Land, in a way. Certainly the idea that you’re traveling around to all these places. Why did you want to carry on that occult travel concept and mold it to London and what it eventually became?

TT: A lot of this stuff was material I'd been fascinated by and wanted to write about before we even created Green Lung. “Graveyard Sun” from Black Harvest was initially part of a concept I had kind of similar to Necropolitan.

When I was about 20, I tried to write a novel which featured the seven cemeteries. It featured things like the Necropolis Railway, which was this real railway which ran underneath London transporting the dead, and also [Alestier] Crowley and the Edwardian occultist scene. So It felt like it was just time to kind of bring that stuff in.

I was really keen on exploring occult London. This Heathen Land was a love letter to growing up in the country. This album's a love letter to London. Necropolitan is a kind of tribute to the city that got us where we are. I didn't want to do Heathen Land II, of course, but I thought by narrowing the parameters and having an even more focused landscape to explore, we could kind of keep on pulling on those strings.

 

But also, a big part of the mythology of Green Lung has always been this triumph of nature over mankind. For me, these seven cemeteries that circle the city are just such inspirational places, because they're a very visual representation of nature winning over mankind.

They were built in the Victorian period by very rich people to be Egyptian Valley of the King-style monuments to their greatness and glory. But now, in 2026, most of them are completely overgrown, falling to pieces. No one knows who any of these people really are. There's a few famous people mingled in there, but all these industrialists and incredibly wealthy people are completely forgotten. I think there's something just really inspiring about that when you're doing a nature-themed metal band.

It's funny, I was kind of nervous about moving away from the rural landscape and that kind of folklore, but then there's just so much interesting folklore in the city as well.

And you’ve already set the table with songs like Maxine (Witch Queen), so it already makes sense in the grand scheme of the band.

TT: That's also something you only get once you've done a few albums and get people to trust you. I find it really interesting how when you do album one, the entire context of the band is in that album. But when you’re on album four, you can afford to spread your wings a bit and take people with you to a new place.

Something that's been really exciting for me is thinking of each album as a different little world. I really want each album to have a really particular flavor, where there's a strong identity with each album. It's something I really love as a fan, and I love doing it as an artist as well. So much of what we do is also visual, dependent on Richard [Wells], our sort of in-house artist. Just being able to work with him to kind of create these worlds.

It's just a “fuck you” you to the current way of a world, where it's so ephemeral and digital and fake. There are AI bands out there. I think it's my impulse as an artist to become more and more physical. Really taking each album as a lasting thing. I want people to be listening to these things in 20, 30 years, much like the albums over there on my shelf.

What I love about metal is the fact that stuff does hang around and does kind of take on new cadences with different generations listening to it. So I think it's our obligation to not get lazy and do the ridiculously detailed booklet and maps and lyrics and everything.

There's only so far you can go with the constrictions of two sides of vinyl and booklet, but you're damn sure I'm going to use it! It’s the difference between just flicking through something on Spotify when you're on your commute versus sitting with an album.

If I can get someone to take the concept of the album seriously, sit down with it and have it on the vinyl player and really focus on it, I think it's just going to be more rewarding for both of us.

How did working with producer Tom Dalgety again help shape this record?

TT: With Heathen Land, we spent maybe a month in the studio and we didn't come in with a super clear plan. There was a lot of time spent working on synth sounds or trying to get some of the more ambient elements right, whereas this time we came in with a lot more pre-production.

That was the big revelation of working with Tom. Six months before the studio basically recording everything in our practice space just working on the songs. Which meant that we came in and did it all in nine days.

We recorded the foundational parts of each song – drums, bass, rhythm guitar – live in the room. I don't think we would have been able to do that if we hadn’t been playing live so much. That was one of the great things about coming off Heathen Land and feeling really confident.

We edited these songs on Necropolitan more than ever before. We took a machete to some stuff. It’s kind of funny in our genre to be like that, but that's Scott. He's so militant with himself about keeping the listener interested and not having much fat on it.

In a weird way, things sound more impactful when you strip stuff out. So we were listening to AC/DC and some big, classic records thinking, ‘Do we have the balls to just strip it down to exactly what we sound like live?’ It's like the songs take on more power if you're brutal with yourself and only just let the good shit through.

What books helped you with researching the stories for this record?

TT: [I read] a really great one that helped with “Alostrael”, and I actually want to explore this more in future songs. It's called City of the Beast by Phil Baker. Great publisher called Strange Attractor here in London who do lots of weird shit. Arik Roper, who did a lot of art for Sleep and Windhand, they did his book of art. They do a bunch of occulty, weirdy, countercultural freaky shit, and I love their books.

That book is basically a biography of Aleister Crowley told through the places he lived and went in London. So for this album it was really useful. Alan Moore, who wrote Watchman, has just written this book about London which sort of merges the real and the imagined. This is a city of stories and ghosts and magic and weird shit. What I love about London is it's just so heavy with story and history.

I’m always attracted to a new look at something familiar, and I think Alostrael I saw as a kind of sequel to Maxine. Again, it’s a woman who had a lot of magical power, (but) people don't really talk about Leah Hirsig or Alostrael. I'd never heard of her as a kid. Then when you look into Crowley, she was his muse, she was there with him when he set up the Abbey of Thelema. She traveled around London and Paris with him, and was this artist that helped him create his whole mythology. But she's kind of been lost from the story, so it's just like bringing some of these figures back into the limelight.

 

On the lyrical themes, what was your thought process trying to combine more philosophical and modern connections – like on “Dance to the Grave –  with the throughline of spooky folklore?

TT: Every Green Lung song is a horror story but sometimes a horror story is political. I think sometimes the narrator in a Green Long song is M. R. James style: someone out in the woods or in a ruined abbey or something. Whereas sometimes the horror story is where we're headed. Born to a Dying World also fits that.

“Dance to the Grave” is kind of a mission statement. Everything passes. The big theme of the album is death. I'm not sure how explicit it is, but for me, Woodland Rites is a spring album, Black Harvest is an autumn album, Heathen Land is summer, and then this was winter. This thing of death and the end of things being furthest from the light. It felt like tackling that head-on with the first song would be really satisfying.

I think it’s the most “War Pigs” I've ever got, really. It's very much at the core of what I like to express with Green Lung, this sort of eco-anxiety. The sense that whatever government we vote for, we get the same shit. Everything else sacrificed at the altar of the markets. Get rid of tradition, community, anything that binds us together, and just enrich the rich. It's pretty bleak, reveling in it, almost. We can't really stop this, so we might as well have fun while we're still going. That's not necessarily what I entirely believe, but it's a feeling that I go through.

The album itself, I just wanted to kind of look at the theme of death being the ultimate triumph of nature. You can put your head in a cryogenic chamber, you can de-age yourself, you can have plastic surgeries, but you're gonna be fucking dead. There's something really empowering about embracing death. Metal is weirdly a bunch of people who are really comfortable thinking about death. In mainstream culture, ever more people shy away from it and pretend that they can cheat it.

For me, Memento Mori isn't a gothic, spooky thing. You will die, so live every day. Love your friends, love your family, pet your cat, make music, drink, be happy, enjoy life, rather than spending your entire time tracking your heart rate.

When people listen to Necropolitan, what do you want them to take away for the record?

TT: I want their trust. I want them to come into the world of Green Lung, like what they hear, like what they see, dig in, go down the rabbit holes, read loads of books, watch movies they maybe haven't seen and listen to some bands they maybe haven't heard of.

I'd love to be that gateway band for people and for them to trust us as musicians and storytellers. There's a whole lot of space we want to explore and places we want to go with this. If people keep letting us, we will. We will do our best to keep them happy, man. Honestly, it's a real privilege. We're all veterans of the game. Lots of shitty bands. Lots of failed attempts, and we don't take it lightly. We love it, and we love everyone who listens to it. It's been such a happy thing.

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Necropolitan by Green Lung is available everywhere on September 11 via Nuclear Blast Records. Order the album - HERE