Green Lung

GREEN LUNG RETURN WITH FOURTH ALBUM NECROPOLITAN, A LOVE LETTER TO GOTHIC LONDON IN RIFFS

The funeral bell is tolling, the ravens have left the tower - the long-awaited fourth album from London’s lords of the riff is finally upon us. Necropolitan will be released on Friday September 11th 2026 by Nuclear Blast Records. A monumental portrait of the power of nature over the dreams and dominion of humankind, Necropolitan is also a grand celebration of the occult lore and heavy music scene of the band’s birthplace, the city of London.

The album title derives from the seven garden cemeteries (necropoli) circling the city, all built in the Victorian era:

Built to solve the burial crisis of the Victorian era, where the city’s churchyards became engulfed by the corpses of a growing population, these grand cemeteries were full of monuments to the great and good of the day - magnificent mausoleums, Egyptian-style obelisks and ostentatious marble sarcophagi designed to ensure that their owners’ reputations lived on for eternity. But by the late 1960s, the companies that ran the cemeteries had collapsed, and these places became ruins overgrown with ivy and moss. The seven cemeteries are therefore a focal point for this album as both an encapsulation of the band name ‘Green Lung’ itself - an area of wilderness hidden within the city - but also as symbols of the band’s enduring theme - the ultimate doom of humankind in the face of nature.

With producer Tom Dalgety (Opeth, Ghost) at the helm, this time handling everything from recording to mixing, the band decamped to Rockfield Studios in January 2026, following in the muddy footprints of some of their key inspirations, from Black Sabbath to Queen to Judas Priest. Sonically, they were set on capturing their megalithic live sound more accurately than ever, by stripping back studio trickery, playing the songs incessantly in the practice space and recording drums, bass and rhythm guitars live to capture their Sabbathian heaviness, frenzied Hammonds and haunting Mellotrons as faithfully as possible.

The result is an album that combines the soaring hookiness of This Heathen Land with an uncompromising rawness and heaviness, and takes the band’s distinctive brand of sonic storytelling to macabre new heights.

Opener ‘Dance to the Grave’ delivers a memento mori to the current alliance between far right politics and tech in the face of the climate crisis, with giant, swinging riffs and a chant-along mid-section. Lead single ‘Evil in this House’ answers the question ‘what would it sound like if a stoner metal band carried out a paranormal investigation?’, complete with an ectoplasmic synth solo.

There are surprises: ‘Ozymandias’ muses on the inevitable crumbling of empires via an 1818 sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, combining percussion arrangements inspired by 70s Afrobeat with swaggering riffs, Maidenesque storytelling and a jazz-inspired solo section. On the opposite end of the spectrum, ‘Together in Death’ adds a Baroque touch to the rich vein of gothic psychedelia the band have been mining across all their albums, and nods to the necrophiliac balladry of Alice Cooper. Riley Pinkerton of US fantasy doomers Castle Rat shows up on ‘Alostrael (Be My Babalon)’ to intone narration from Revelations a la Barry Clayton on ‘Number of the Beast’.

But the album also carries on the ‘myths and legends’ strand of This Heathen Land - the Motorhead-meets-Purple madness of ‘Necropolitan Line’ takes inspiration from the real-life Necropolis Railway which transported the dead beneath the city in the early 20th Century, taking the Blackmore/Lord paradigm that the band has always flirted with to its final, breathless conclusion. ‘Black Magick Radio’ celebrates some of the proto-goth subcultures in London in the sixties, referencing The Process Church and the Soho cafe Le Macabre at the same time as reimagining pirate radio as an occult propaganda tool. And epic closer ‘To the Gallows Born’ draws on stories of the Tyburn gallows to create a send-off that lands somewhere between Maiden’s ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ and Sinatra’s ‘My Way’.

If, a year after Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning show and the death of Ozzy Osbourne, you had any doubts about the future of traditional British metal, Necropolitan will lay them to rest. Here is a band taking the torch from the heavy metal godfathers and running with it, bursting with all the musicianship and storytelling flair that has kept the genre’s flame burning for a half-century, and using it to temper a lyrical and sonic world that is entirely their own.

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