Green Lung – Necropolitan
I was ready to love it.. I was.
After those first three albums, I went into Green Lung’s fourth record with high expectations. But Necropolitan doesn’t hit quite as hard, and that’s the first thing worth saying honestly: this is a good record, not a knockout one.
Grave by Grave / Track by Track
The album opens on familiar ground. “Open the Hellmouth” does exactly what an intro track should: set the mood and get out of the way. “Dance to the Grave” is classic Green Lung, a solid, confident start that doesn’t take many risks but doesn’t need to. ”
“Black Magick Radio” is the catchiest thing on the record, almost suspiciously radio-friendly, and its placement right before “Necropolitan Line” turns out to be one of the album’s smarter decisions.
On its own, “Necropolitan Line” (already released as a single) didn’t land well for me: I thought it was too messy, too punky. In context, though, coming right after the polish of “Black Magick Radio,” it works as a deliberate loosening of the reins, a moment where the band lets itself go a bit wild. The Deep Purple-flavoured riffs help, and Tom Templar‘s vocals suit this track better than several others.
“Evil in This House” is closer to the band at their most essential, arguably the purest distillation of the Green Lung formula here, just with a bit more meat on the bones: more keyboards, another guitar solo.
“Together in Death” is a highlight for pure mood: slow, genuinely macabre, and carried by another extended guitar solo. The solo earns its place; it gives the song the dynamic shift it needs. Same reservation as elsewhere, though, on the tone of the lead guitar (more on that below).
“Ozymandias” reads to me as the album’s clearest Black Sabbath homage (“Ozy”? I see what you did there…), and it’s one of the record’s real high points: relentlessly catchy. It’s also where a certain vocal tic becomes hardest to ignore, a theatrical, power-metal-adjacent vibrato on held notes that tips Templar’s performance into more overdone territory than usual. Whether this is a shift in his singing on this record specifically, or something that just hadn’t bothered me before on earlier albums, I couldn’t say.
“Alostrael (Be My Babalon)” is comfortable, familiar Green Lung territory, this one built around a powerful female figure, drawing on Aleister Crowley’s Scarlet Woman lore (Alostrael was Leah Hirsig’s magical name), which reminds me a bit of “Maxine (Witch Queen)” from This Heathen Land.
“To the Gallows Born” closes things out with genuinely great riffs and one of the record’s best moments: a beautiful outro that could’ve stretched even longer, as far as I’m concerned.
Recurring Gripes
Two things kept pulling at me across the whole record, and they’re worth naming directly rather than track by track. First, Templar’s voice: at its rawer, less polished moments it’s immediately more convincing to me, and the issue isn’t with his voice as such but specifically with the theatrical, heavily vibrato-laden delivery that surfaces on certain sustained notes.
Second, the guitar production: the riffs themselves won me over throughout, it’s the lead guitar, and specifically the solos, that consistently struck me as too clean, too sharp, almost overproduced against the raw, live-sounding rhythm section the band was clearly going for.
Final Verdict
As a whole, Necropolitan is good without being mind-blowing the way its three predecessors were for me. On my first listen, the through-line wasn’t obvious, to the point where I felt like I could put this on shuffle without losing much, which, for a Green Lung record, feels close to sacrilege to admit. A second listen shifted that a little, mostly because I started noticing how well certain transitions work, like Black Magick Radio sliding into Necropolitan Line.
Some of that distance might just be geography. This is a record steeped in London’s cemeteries and occult subcultures, and I was listening to it while driving through the German countryside, about as far from that world as you can get. I can easily imagine it hitting differently commuting through London itself, especially with This Heathen Land and now Necropolitan both built around such specific British ground that at this point, if I ever go back to England, I know who I want as my tour guide.
Rating: 8-/10
Release date: September 11, 2026
Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Writer: Tabitha
Tracklist:
- Open the Hellmouth
- Dance to the Grave
- Black Magick Radio
- Necropolitan Line
- Evil in this House
- Together in Death
- Ozymandias
- Alostrael (Be My Babalon)
- To the Gallows Born
