Green Lung explore infernal London on latest album ‘Necropolitan’
The heavy metal masters behind some of the genre’s best contemporary tracks are back with an album on Satanic icons and London’s occult subterranea.
★★★★½
Photo: Andy Ford
“A focus on riffs.” That’s how guitarist and co-songwriter Scott Black described Green Lung’s latest album, Necropolitan. It’s about big, shaking riffs, trying to capture a live sound, and strange, often disturbing pieces of occult history. In that regard, the group’s latest more than delivers.
Three years on since the British five-piece released This Heathen Land — a lavishly crafted doom metal suite to the fiends and folklore of England — the time has come for what the group call a ‘love letter’ to London. Continuing the extensive world-building of their prior record and Black Harvest’s Graveyard Sun, Necropolitan deals with everything from Crowley and Shelley to Satanic radio and the very real London Necropolis railway.
The new album opens with haunting prelude, Into the Hellmouth, setting the scene with cultish chanting and blackened candles. Dance to the Grave, where the album opens in earnest, might not be much of a dancefloor classic, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. About as ‘preachy’ as the group ever gets, according to frontman Tom Templar, it’s a drum-beating parade celebrating the end of all things. A bit too real? Check. Headbanging and heavy? Check.
Black Magick Radio is one of the group’s most enjoyable tracks, pure Satanic panic put into radiowave form. “Through AM and FM / waves our coven grows” — the lyrics are deliciously pulpy, and thoroughly catchy to boot.
Necropolitan Line proves another standout in the band’s canon. It’s about as poppy as Green Lung go; a rollicking voyage down the band’s infernal, subterranean highway. Plus — and this could be said more than once on this album — the electric organ kills.
The yin to the previous track’s yang, Evil in this House is pure doom metal in all its sludgy, heavy-as-tungsten glory. The hook is delectably good, soundtracking these five musicians ghost-hunting at London’s 50 Berkeley Square. Together in Death is what many might deem the obligatory ‘soft point’ of the album, but it proves a thrashing powerhouse in its own right. Musically, it owes a lot to Song of the Stones on the group’s third album, which, despite humble beginnings, lets loose into a doom inferno.
According to Templar, Ozymandias is the ‘heart of the album’, and he could not be more right. It’s the sprawling, thumping masterstroke on an already solid record, re-imagining Percy Shelley’s unbridled 1818 poem as a heavy metal odyssey in the style of Iron Maiden’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. There are flourishes of guitar in there that remind me of ‘70s rock groups Deep Purple or Boston; it’s tyrant-taunting poetry done right.
Alostrael (Be My Babalon) features the first ‘collaboration’ the group have had, with Riley Pinkerton of Castle Rat fame providing some ‘narration from Revelation’. An ode to Leah Hirsig, spiritual partner to Aleister Crowley (could it be an occult rock record without reference to Crowley?), it’s a worthy album track — and, in true Green Lung, tongue-in-cheek fashion, has a wicked shoutout to The Witch’s Black Phillip.
The group have written some awe-inspiring album closers in their time (Born to a Dying World on Black Harvest, Oceans of Time on This Heathen Land), and they refuse to snuff the trend on Necropolitan. To the Gallows Born imagines a trip to the hangman’s noose as perverse, macabre theatre. It throws us back to the folkier beginnings of Woodland Rites, before barreling into something between pulsing ballad and power metal rocker.
Necropolitan is the natural progression of where Green Lung have been heading until now. It’s still maximalist, British doom metal, replete with riffs and rich, soaring choruses, but made for the live setting. It feels purpose-built for arenas and stadiums, which Green Lung have not yet achieved, but seem destined for. The new album is pure Ghost meets Maiden, proof that obscure, occultish rituals and the morbid annals of history deserve to be told in high-definition heavy metal — relentless and rocking.
Necropolitan is out now via Nuclear Beast.
