Tom Templar sees each of Green Lung’s four albums like the seasons of the year. Soaked in folk-horror and captivated by visions of the May Queen, 2019 debut Woodland Rites revelled in the rites of spring. Follow-up Black Harvest was, naturally, more autumnal. Their This Heathen Land breakthrough was the raucous sound of summer solstice celebration and Saturnalian festival excess.
Completing the set, Necropolitan is the sound of winter, all deep shadows, long nights and flickering firelight.
“What I didn’t want to do was some sort of Christmassy Yuletide album,” he says, flashing a wicked grin. “It’s really more about death than winter itself, but as the season of death – and the absence of life – those things are inextricably connected for me. It’s less about pagan festivities than the dark.”
More specifically, Necropolitan is an ode to London and The Big Smoke’s countless dead. Leaving behind the teeming life of the countryside for cold concrete and cobblestone fit the concept well.
“We needed to do a ‘London album’, and I’d always been fascinated by the ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries,” Tom nods. “In a lot of European cities, you see that tension where honouring the dead wasn’t as simple in the cities as it was in the countryside. It was a problem to be solved technologically, like how Paris has those amazing catacombs.
“These places become like cities of the dead with the same layout as the city itself. There were grand tombs for the rich and unmarked graves for the poor. Even architecturally, they mirror so much of the Victorian and Georgian parts of the city itself. The graveyards become like the city in miniature, these sort of morbid model villages.”
Folklore isn’t an exclusively rural phenomenon, either. As a place where for two millennia people have lived and died, London has remained a hotbed for all things weird, wonderful and witchy.
“There’s this fascinating ‘portrait in the attic’ thing going on,” Tom continues. “Cities are built by the living and inhabited by people who want to be surrounded by all this human life. But they are dead places in many ways. They are the apotheosis of ‘natural life’. The dead who built the city fill its graveyards.
“London has become something of a corporate city nowadays, too, indistinguishable in many parts from other modern cities. But you just need to go along that little alleyway or climb down some stairs and this whole other, weirder city is revealed. Occult means ‘hidden’. So it would be crazy in our ‘occult rock’ discography not to explore those hidden places.”
Indeed. ere, our guide takes us through the streets, cemeteries and railways of Necropolitan, one song at a time…