London stoner-goth band Green Lung veer too much into self-parody on their most recent album Necropolitan.
Release date: September 11, 2026 | Nuclear Blast Records | Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Alright. A few things I must get out of the way, else I face accusations of hypocrisy. I love the following:
- Silly over-the-top shit
- Halloween
- A variety of music subgenres and bands that could be described as tacky, such as Ghost and Creeper
- The first two Green Lung albums
Okay, now that that is over with, let’s discuss Green Lung‘s most recent effort, Necropolitan. I do not care for this album with the exception of two tracks, which is wildly disappointing considering how much I dug Woodland Rites and Black Harvest, and to some degree 2023’s This Heathen Land. Necropolitan is Green Lung gesturing at the whole occult stoner rock thing that they’ve mastered in the past without any of the gusto or self-awareness that is required for music like this, and the result is that the record sounds like the soundtrack for a joyless millennial Halloween party.
We open with “Open the Hellmouth”, which is a bit of an Irish-Appalachian folk dirge, and while that’s not exactly my thing, it’s at least interesting, and I figured that might color the general tone of the album. Nope! This sound promptly disappears until the closing track, making for two very disconnected bookends sandwiching a strangely uninteresting collection of tracks between.
Let’s start with “Black Magick Radio”, one of the singles. I want to like this so, so bad, but I just cannot. Between flat production, flat performances, and flat lyrics, this song was the ill omen I had been dreading regarding this album cycle. It’s tongue-in-cheek without the tongue; tragically unoriginal and executed as blandly as possible.
Then we come to “Necropolitan Line”, which is where I pretty much gave up on Necropolitan and wrote it off as a half-assed attempt by Green Lung to maintain their retro-goth credibility and do what, honest to god, sounds like a Spinal Tap offcut. Normally, I would be here for this–as mentioned, I am a lover of silly shit–but unfortunately, it feels like Green Lung thought they were cooking with this one, leaning too far into the camp without actually committing to it.
I think that is the central failure of Necropolitan. It’s not that I do not like the genre of Green Lung, and in fact am into the whole throwback fantasy thing that folks like Earth Tongue are doing. I like the warbly vocals. I like the spooky imagery. I like the idea of all of this! There are plenty of bands working in a similar niche right now–Spell, Uncle Acid and The Deadbeats, Mountain Witch–but all of these groups have that winking knowledge that yes, this is fun, and we’re having fun.
Green Lung do not really seem to be having fun on this album.
I guess it is not entirely an all-skip affair. I quite liked “Dance to the Grave”, the second track, which briefly provided me with some hope for the rest of the album. Alas. This song has a killer central riff, and works in that Hammond B3 organ sound that signals ‘old-school horror’ to so many people. This is the right balance, I feel; full-sending the atmosphere while still prioritizing songwriting.
“Evil in this House” is also acceptable, and the best of the singles by a mile, with the mid-tempo pseudo-doom harkening back to a groovier ’70s version of the band. But two solid tracks out of nine are not nearly enough to save the album.
What it comes down to, at least for me, is that Green Lung have somehow lost the spark of their previous albums, as well as any sense of humor about their own work. Necropolitan felt stale, verging on soulless, unintentionally funny to the point of self-parody, like Muse‘s cursed late career output. It’s the entire problem with Greta Van Fleet, do you know what I mean? The artifice of it all overwhelms any god damn moxie that this thing could have had.
Oh well. I will be riding the “Necropolitan Line” right the fuck outta here.
