In the studio with Green Lung: “We kept it metal and kept it filthy”

To follow up their magickal This Heathen Land album, Green Lung headed to deepest Wales where, says Tom Templar, they got rural making a heavier record with a gritty ’80s London vibe, ran their ideas past an ancient Road Man, and got Indian food recommendations from Judas Priest.

“It’s where loads of bands have been: Sabbath, Queen, Judas Priest, Oasis, Rush. We spent nine days there and it was incredible. Kingsley [Ward] who runs it is 86 and he’s full of stories, but he’s also indistinguishable from your average Welsh farmer. They’re still going and mucking out the cows and stuff. We felt really at home. I was getting vocals down in three takes and moving on. The guitars sound massive, but it’s one guitar, not 1,000 like last time. All the ‘rock history’ stuff was all pretty understated, but in Monmouth we went to a curry house, which had an amazing menu with testimonials like: ‘Delicious curry – Judas Priest.’”

“Do you know the Stafford Road Man? He’s this imagining of what an Anglo-Saxon man would have looked like. Scott [Black, guitar] was like, ‘Let’s print this guy out and put him on the desk to remind us, like, anytime we make a decision, that it’s for him.’ The Stafford Road Man with a pint at a metal festival, that’s who we’re playing for. It answers so many arguments. If Tom Dalgety [producer] went, ‘We should play the string synth on this track,’ we’d all look at the Road Man and go, ‘He wouldn’t want that.’ That was quite a good gambit from Scott to keep it metal and keep it filthy.”

“It’s heavier, in the sense that it sounds more live, and it punches a bit more. It’s more on the Sabbathy side of what we do. On the Queen/Sabbath ratio the last album cocked towards Queen. This one, we’re cocked more towards Sabbath. We went in wanting it to be heavier and rawer. I definitely think it’s rawer. To the untrained ear, it will sound heavier, but I actually think it’s a really good evolution of the songwriting we were doing, and because we’ve recorded it more live it feels like more of a riffs album. Last time, there were songs like Maxine (Witch Queen) and Oceans Of Time that were song-songs, this time there’s only one like that, probably.”

“On This Heathen Land, I ploughed that furrow pretty much as deep as I wanted to go with it. That was a love letter to 22 years of living in rural Norfolk, and the new one is a love letter to 15 years spent in London. It’s much more of a London record – 1982 gritty London. Is Margaret Thatcher in a wicker man? No, but that’s a very Green Lung idea. It’s not got those merry England vibes. The vista has moved on. It’s kind of like The Number Of The Beast to Piece Of Mind, or Piece Of Mind to Powerslave – it’s the same, it’s us, but we’re in a different world. When people see the album cover and the whole concept, they’ll get it. It’s not This Heathen Land Part II, but it’s still Green Lung, and there’s still Richard Wells doing the art.”

“A lot of the album comes from this novel I tried to write when I was about 21. I completely failed at it, I fucked it, but the research was really cool. There’s lots of stuff that’s been swimming around in my subconscious for ages. There’s also one song, which is literally an idea I had when I was doing Tomb King, my teenage doom band, but wasn’t clever or witty enough to pull it off. Luckily, 1717 years later, I now have the means!”

Green Lung’s new album will be released later this year. The band headline Desertfest London on May 16.

This interview originally appeared in the spring 2026 issue.

Read this next:

• Green Lung: The ultimate guide to their heathen universe
• Green Lung: “None of this stuff feels like we’re gunning for it – it just happens because we fucking love it”
• Green Lung’s Tom Templar: The 10 songs that changed my life