Green Lung: Sowing The Seeds
Back in 2017 a new occult hard rock band spilled onto London’s scene, preaching peculiar folktales and telling tales of forest sorcery. Skip ahead a couple of years, and GREEN LUNG are selling out shows at The Dome, gracing the Sophie Lancaster Stage at Bloodstock and releasing their second album Black Harvest. What has been the secret to their success? Some manner of ancient magic? An alliance with the sprites of the forest? As we found out, the answer is not so surprising after all: you reap what you sow.
“I feel like people take one look at the name, and think to themselves: well, that must be more of that boring stoner doom sort of thing,” begins vocalist Tom Templar. “It’s funny, because we’re really not like that at all.” Beneath their stoner masquerade lies a compelling heavy-metal quintet, taking cues from English folklore and classic horror flicks to keep the old ones alive. “It’s a collision of my bookish nerdiness and love of horror,” explains Tom. “I have a huge collection of weird folklore books, and I’ve been a horror fan from an early age; watching The Evil Dead at fifteen before moving onto obscure Giallo films – I’d run out of horror to watch by my early twenties!”
The singer’s enthusiasm for all things creepy and old is writ large in the video for their latest single Graveyard Sun, which explores occult romance through the lens of a late-mid-century BBC documentary style, directed by PUPPY drummer Billy Howard Price. “I’ve always loved PUPPY’s music videos: they’re fun, and after supporting them on tour, the opportunity came about to work with Billy on a video,” Tom recalls. “I really didn’t want us to do a staged performance video of us in a wood, that would be too predictable, and I’d rather do a funny video, because metal is so often too po-faced. The main character’s actor is in Scum,” he continues, “which is a seventies prison movie starring Ray Winstone. He was really game! That was a funny day; I was worried we’d gone too silly, but I like to think it’s the right side of camp – more Hammer horror and less Monty Python!”
From the outside, it seems that success has come quickly and easily for GREEN LUNG, who have gone from playing mixed bill all-dayers in pubs to selling out headline shows and performing at Bloodstock Festival in a matter of years. “We released our first EP Free The Witch on cassette, and people really dug it. Positive feedback came from a really underground, culty corner of the internet, which spurred us on to do Woodland Rites. A YouTube rip of that album was at 500,000 views at one point. That was mind-blowing to me,” reflects Tom. For a band so steeped in tradition, GREEN LUNG’s ascent from the underground has been surprisingly modern: the days when a few choice words in Kerrang! or Metal Hammer made a band are well and truly over.
“Until very recently, we’ve been largely ignored by metal magazines in the UK. Actually, the UK is pretty hard to break as a genre metal band,” he adds, “but we’ve done better in the US, and there’s a Guardian piece on us which is mad. None of that moved the dial a bit compared to Reddit, YouTube and especially Bandcamp,” observes Tom. “I grew up in the nineties when print media was still dominant, but people don’t go to those places any more. The band was growing online; we could see it. Bandcamp was the seed of all this, and it took the magazines longer to catch up with where we were.”
As the UK went into lockdown, GREEN LUNG retired to the valleys to record the follow-up to the cult phenomenon Woodland Rites. “Our producer wanted to book us in for a residential session, and the studio we chose was in the arse-end of nowhere. The whole atmosphere was extremely ‘GREEN LUNG’, the weather more than anything: two weeks of mist and fog.” During their time in Giant Wafer Studios, the band happened across a recording opportunity like no other for Black Harvest. “The first day there we went to look around the nearby village, and took a look inside the local church, which was unlocked. John started playing the organ, and I began singing. We ended up recording the vocals for the first track there, which is more of a theme than a song.”
As the worst of the ‘plague’ passed, GREEN LUNG had album number-two in hand, and were ready to pick up where they had left off. “Bloodstock. That felt like the breakout moment for us,” remembers Tom. “Everyone was buzzing at that show, and our socials went through the roof afterwards. Loads of people who just like heavy metal were really into it, and people seemed to be willing us on,” he beams. “We’re always going to be a bunch of weirdos, and we’ve been swept up in the moment; a small moment, but that’s still really cool. We had almost given up. We just wanted to make a fun band: back to basics, big solos, big hooks, singing not screaming. I wanted to make the forestry folklore band which I had always wanted when I was a kid. You can try to game it, but that never works, and when you do something authentically weird instead, people really attach themselves to it.”
Things look bright for this young band, who have the enthusiasm to see their vision through to the end. “The band is easily the best it’s been in terms of musicianship and songwriting,” Tom notes. “We have found out who we are. We have four or five demo songs lined up, and we’ve not been trying really!” Whatever they do after Black Harvest, GREEN LUNG are becoming hard to ignore. “Epic power-psych: that’s the sound we’re homing in on. My favourite part of the band is when we’re playing live, it’s the most inspiring part of the experience. If my notebook is anything to go by, we have a good few albums to go!”
Black Harvest is out now via Svart Records.
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