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For a band still yet to hit their 10-year mark, Green Lung have reached heights most of their peers can only dream of. Since forming in 2017 after a “seven-pint deep” conversation in London boozer The Black Heart, and more recently headlining the 3,000-plus capacity Roundhouse at this year’s Desertfest, their anthemic blend of doomy, witchy heavy metal inspired by British folklore, history and mythology has captivated the metal masses.
With each of their albums based on a season, their fourth, Necropolitan, represents winter, taking its title from the seven garden cemeteries of Victorian London, from Highgate to Tower Hamlets. We sat down with guitarist Scott Black and vocalist Tom Templar to find out more.
Rural beginnings set them on their path
Growing up in Dorset (Scott) and rural Norfolk (Tom), the pair’s upbringings informed what the band would become.
“I was always a kid who had a lot of obsessions – like bugs and mushrooms and anything weird,” says Templar, who writes Green Lung’s lyrics. “Folklore and mythology were an early obsession of mine. I think it’s because it made the landscape around me have that sense of enchantment.”
“I didn’t grow up in a musical household,” says Black, who writes the music. “Nu metal was big then, and I asked my nan to buy me a Machine Head record, and she accidentally bought me Deep Purple’s Machine Head – which was very fortuitous for Green Lung.”
Templar is a storyteller at heart
As a child, Templar was always writing stories and making his own music magazines with fictional bands. He now works in book publishing, and Green Lung’s new album Necropolitan came from a novel he started as a 21-year-old.
“It was an occult mystery [about London]. But it turns out if you’re 21 years old, and you’ve never been to London, you can’t really write that. But the fun thing is I can now play around with things I’ve written before, and rework them into a Green Lung song.”
Books by other writers also proved inspirational. On Necropolitan, the song Ozymandias refers to the poem of the same name by British Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. “That poem really fit the theme of the album,” Templar says. “It’s this meditation on how quickly empires fall and the triumph of nature.”
They want to bring back the art of writing classics
Green Lung aim to write anthems – songs that will be remembered, that audiences can sing along with.
“Iconic songs like Breaking The Law, Run To The Hills,” Templar says. “We’re both obsessed with classic songwriting. I feel that honed songcraft is missing from mainstream metal at the moment.”
“I call it ‘propulsive songwriting’,” Black says. “We take the core and musicality of early proto-metal – like Uriah Heep, Rainbow, Deep Purple, Sabbath – where it was very freeform and experimental, since those guys were inventing it from the ground up, and work on the songcraft.”
For them, heavy metal is spiritual
Many of Green Lung’s lyrics explore spirituality and the occult, but they aren’t practitioners of any particular faith.
Templar: “I was very religious as a kid. But when I was about twelve I renounced Christianity and replaced it with music. I feel like in the last sixty years or so people have flocked to live music as a replacement for a church. There’s so much about heavy metal as a subculture that has similarities to religion: the devotion, the ceremonial gigs, how you dress in a way that identifies you.”
“If you look at the function [organised religion] fulfils,” Scott adds, “like community, identity, that fortification of the self, those are things that metal can be a surrogate for.”
They don’t mind being mocked
When Green Lung played Bloodstock festival in 2024, Templar saw a sign that poked fun at the band’s lyrics.
“It was like: ‘Abandoned Green Lung song titles’,” he says, “with tracks like ‘Bog Body’, just a comedy list. The fact they could parody us shows that Green Lung actually means something.”
Their new album symbolises the band’s ethos
Green Lung named Necropolitan after seven grand Victorian cemeteries because they represent the power of nature – a subject close to their hearts.
“Each Green Lung album is really about nature and humankind,” Templar says. “These [cemeteries] were monuments for people and are now totally overgrown. There’s this idea that humans are special and will always dominate. Green Lung interrogates that.”
Necropolitan is out now via Nuclear Blast. Green Lung tour Europe in December. For dates and tickets, check the Green Lung website.
