Necropolitan Line is a song about a real railway. The London Necropolis Railway existed: a Victorian train line built to carry the dead out of the overcrowded city to their graves. Green Lung turned it into what their own announcement calls a Motörhead-meets-Deep-Purple rampage, and that single sentence is the whole band. Genuine London history, occult dressing, riffs your dad would recognise. Watch the video above and try not to grin.
Green Lung is a London occult doom band whose fourth album Necropolitan arrives 11 September 2026 on Nuclear Blast. It was produced, recorded and mixed by Tom Dalgety at Rockfield Studios in January 2026, and the band describes it as a celebration of the occult lore and heavy music scene of their home city. Nine tracks, from Open the Hellmouth to To the Gallows Born, with singles Evil in This House (the video a homage to 70s haunted-house films), Black Magick Radio, and this one.
They are the crossover darlings of the scene right now, and deservedly. But the more interesting question is the one behind them: why does Britain keep producing this exact band?
The oldest tradition in heavy music
Follow the line. Black Sabbath invents the sound in industrial Birmingham, naming itself after a horror film. Witchfinder General takes its name from a 1968 British horror picture during the NWOBHM years, while Angel Witch put the occult in the same wave. Cathedral drags it through the nineties. Electric Wizard scores entire albums to the Hammer-horror back catalogue from rural Dorset. Uncle Acid films Cambridge like a cursed VHS tape. And now Green Lung, who write about witch cults and dead railways with a synth-organ swelling underneath.
That is fifty-five years of the same aesthetic regenerating, and it is not coincidence. Britain built the source material. Hammer Films manufactured gothic horror in a studio outside London for three decades, the landscape does half the work (moors, ruins, stone circles, bad weather), and the occult rock template never needs updating because the imagery never stops being available. Other countries borrowed the look. Britain lives on the set.
The Dalgety thread
One more connection worth pulling. Necropolitan is the third record in our recent coverage with Tom Dalgety’s name on it, after Death SS and his defining work with Ghost. One producer keeps surfacing wherever theatrical occult heaviness gets serious about songwriting. If the revival has a sound engineer of record, it is him.
Album lands 11 September. The same day as the new Fluisteraars, incidentally. Mark the date and pick your ritual: Dutch forest or London graveyard.
Listen to this: Green Lung - Necropolitan
