Music
Interview
Green Lung: “I like to rebel against the po-faced, identi-kit blandness of modern metal”
Nuclear Blast's fast-rising superstars on new album Necropolitan and the importance of levity in heavy music
You can’t talk about rising talent in metal without mentioning Green Lung. Formed in London in 2016, the five-piece are the best 70s band to have never existed in that decade. Their songs bridge the raw doom of Black Sabbath with the Martin Birch-produced extravagance of Deep Purple, while their lyrics about the folklore of ancient England evoke The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man.
In May, the riff-slingers brought their career full circle by headlining Camden’s Desertfest: the same festival where they formed 10 years prior. They’re now en route to releasing their fourth album, Necropolitan, which pulls their focus from the lush keyboards of 2023 predecessor This Heathen Land towards crushing guitars and tells morbid tales from the city of London. They’ll celebrate the release with a December tour supported by High on Fire and Gnome.
Ahead of the band’s extremely busy release and touring cycle, I caught up with singer Tom Templar to chat about 10 years of Green Lung, recording at hallowed studio Rockfield and why he isn’t keen on a lot of modern metal.
How’s the album rollout been so far? You headlined Desertfest in May, you’ve been putting out singles…
It’s been fun! This Heathen Land was such a big jump, from being a DIY thing to a more professional thing, and that was much more painful than this. But, yeah, Desertfest was crazy! It was kind of a symbolic thing for us.
Because the band formed at Desertfest 10 years beforehand, right?
It did feel like a big event doing our first festival headliner, but the story was almost the most powerful thing. A lot of people in that crowd had come along with us, and it felt like a win for them, too.
It wasn’t quite perfect, though. Has the manotaur [the band’s walk-on mascot, whose head malfunctioned during the Desertfest set] recovered from his broken neck yet?
I don’t know. Haha! He immediately went in for surgery.
Was that the biggest Spinal Tap moment of the career so far?
I feel like there has been stupider shit. It’s usually just like, ‘Oh, we need to get up at 3am to go to a standing stone and do a photoshoot,’ and you’re just freezing your arse off and you’re half-delirious.
Green Lung have been obsessed with folk stories from rural Albion up to this point, but the new album, Necropolitan, tells morbid tales from your adopted hometown of London. Why switch? Did you not have another album of rural Albion material in you?
I actually think I do, but I was inspired by bands like Iron Maiden, where there’s a different vista when it comes to each new record. It felt like a nice way to pay tribute to the last 10 years of Green Lung as a London band. Also, folklore is not this thing that just exists in the countryside; it’s everywhere around us. London is such a city of stories, and I was excited to venture in and see what was there.
I like the idea of different vistas. Green Lung in space, when?
Haha! I don’t think we’ll make it to space, unless it’s in a Quatermass Experiment kind of way. I have a really strong sense of what is and isn’t a Green Lung subject. It has to be quintessentially British, so Quatermass, we could get there.
When you announced the album, you said that each Green Lung album in some way connects to a season. This one’s winter.
I never wanted it to be like [colour-coded sludge metal band] Baroness and call the albums, like, Spring or something. It’s more a light thematic touch, but I think you can tell that Woodland Rites is spring, Black Harvest is autumn and This Heathen Land is summer. This one’s winter, but only because of death. Winter, to me, symbolises the absence of life. It’s the darkest of the Green Lung albums in terms of subject matter, but I think all Green Lung albums are usually quite fun.
Doom with a wink, isn’t it?
Yeah, exactly, although I think doom was always with a wink. I think Black Sabbath is really fun music, you know? A lot of it’s got humour, and I like to rebel against the po-faced, identi-kit blandness of modern metal. I think modern metal is so serious.
In what way?
I think a lot of modern metal is scared to be camp, even when you’re a really theatrical metalcore band or something. I think it’s just a result of the last 20 years of the main medium through which you get heavy music being YouTube and social media. Big breakdowns are so shareable. When I listen to a lot of modern metalcore, a lot of it feels so similar.
Green Lung is a band with lore, and that’s such a big thing in today’s metal scene. You look at the bands who blew up the biggest in the last 10 years – I’m thinking Ghost and Sleep Token – and they have their own mythologies just like you do. Ghost have that more playful approach to it, like Black Sabbath and Green Lung, but Sleep Token are so deadly serious about it.
You’re totally right. Green Lung, we slowly put out our tentacles and bring in more lore, and it builds, and it’s self-referential, both lyrically and musically. If you came on board at [2018 debut EP] Free the Witch, there’ll be a couple of references to it on the new album directly, or at least even approaches to songs that nod back to that. My favourite bands – Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, the classic metal bands that we love – all have a lot to dig in with.
But you also pull in different directions on this record; it’s not all self-referential. Isn’t ‘Dance to the Grave’ you taking aim at AI tech bros, basically?
To a degree. It’s about being an artist in the age of tech. I think AI is the moment where people have looked around and gone, ‘Why are we on our smartphones all the time? Why is all culture being arranged around the whims of a few people in San Francisco?’ I think there’s a really dangerous ideology behind the tech industry, especially people like Peter Thiel, who genuinely believe that they are able to destroy democracy and build spaceships and go off to the stars.
The album is more stripped-back and riff-based than This Heathen Land. You recorded it at Rockfield – previously used by Rush, Queen and Judas Priest – and worked with Tom Dalgety, who’s produced Ghost and Opeth. Why did you use this studio and this producer who’ve both made these lush, expansive, textured records when the goal was to make something rawer?
I see what you mean, but we wanted to capture the live sound of the band more than we ever had before. Tom had done a record with Clutch, who were the first band that really took us on a big European tour, and that record [2022’s Sunrise on Slaughter Beach] was much like that. We actually recorded the whole thing in nine days and there’s something really exciting about that as a musician, because you’re working on instinct and being hyper-decisive. There’s no sitting around thinking about what you’re gonna do. It’s funny, because, to me, This Heathen Land has more layers to it, but taking stuff out actually makes this record feel bigger. If you have one guitar track, sometimes it sounds a lot bigger.
You’ve got a headline tour coming up with High on Fire and Gnome. How does it feel to have stoner legends High on Fire supporting you?
Very weird, mate. They asked us to support them about three years ago. We were like, ‘Yes!’, and then the pandemic happened. When our booking agent was like, ‘I’m going to try and get High on Fire,’ we were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and they were up for it, which is really exciting!
How would the Tom Templar who co-founded Green Lung at Desertfest 2016 feel if you told him High on Fire will open for his band one day?
He’d be shit-scared.
