Green Lung have given “Ozymandias” a new visual life, pairing the Necropolitan track with an animated video that sharpens the song’s central idea: power looks permanent until time, nature and memory reduce it to fragments.

The London band released the video through Nuclear Blast as a late-October companion to their fourth album, which arrived in September. According to the label’s announcement, the animation was created by illustrator Richard Wells and animator Joseph Brett. Vocalist Tom Templar has described the song as one of the band’s favourites to play and linked its subject directly to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem about the collapse of human ambition.

A poem that still carries weight

Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is built around a simple but enduring image: the remains of a ruler’s monument standing in a vast, empty landscape. The inscription boasts of absolute power, while everything around it demonstrates the opposite. Green Lung do not treat that contrast as a museum piece. Their version brings it into a musical world shaped by distorted guitars, organ colour and a sense of ritual drama.

That choice fits the band’s broader writing. Green Lung have long used folklore, occult imagery and British landscape as ways of talking about the present. Here, imperial certainty becomes another ghost story—one in which the haunting comes from the ruins left by people who believed they could outlast history.

Animation as interpretation

A performance video might have emphasised the song’s live force. Animation allows a different approach. It can move between symbolic spaces without needing to explain them literally, making scale, decay and transformation part of the storytelling.

The official announcement credits Wells and Brett, collaborators whose work places the track inside the band’s established visual language rather than attaching a generic promotional clip. The result is best understood as an interpretation of the song, not an illustration that closes down its meaning.

The sound of Necropolitan

“Ozymandias” also makes sense as a window into Necropolitan. Nuclear Blast says the record was made with producer Tom Dalgety at Rockfield Studios, with an emphasis on capturing more of Green Lung’s live weight and reducing some of the dense layering associated with earlier work.

That approach suits a track built on a large central image. The riffs need physical presence, but the arrangement also needs room for the words and atmosphere to register. Green Lung’s heavy-metal vocabulary is traditional in its foundations, yet the band’s identity comes from how those foundations are joined to Hammond organ, progressive detail and a distinctly British sense of place.

London, death and the limits of control

The album title refers to the ring of Victorian garden cemeteries around London. That setting gives the record a concrete geography: these are landscapes designed by people, then reclaimed by weather, plants, wildlife and changing urban life. “Ozymandias” extends the same argument on a larger scale.

Neither the song nor the video needs a topical slogan. The warning is already clear. Systems of power present themselves as inevitable; ruins prove that they are not. By translating Shelley’s poem into a heavy-metal narrative, Green Lung preserve its ambiguity while making its pressure immediate.

A song prepared for the stage

The timing also points forward. Green Lung are due to take the song on a December European tour with High On Fire and Gnome. Templar’s comment that it is a practice-room favourite suggests the track was built to survive outside the studio—an important test for material whose atmosphere could otherwise depend too heavily on production.

The video therefore works on two levels. It gives “Ozymandias” a complete visual statement, while also inviting listeners back to a song that will soon have to communicate through volume, timing and performance alone.

More than a Halloween extra

The label introduced the video as a Halloween release, but its value is not seasonal. The animation expands one of Necropolitan’s central ideas: death and nature are not merely gothic decoration; they are forces that expose the limits of ownership, glory and control.

Green Lung’s strongest work has always made old stories feel active rather than antique. “Ozymandias” continues that pattern. The poem supplies the ruin, the band supplies the electricity, and the video turns the meeting into a warning that remains difficult to ignore.

Source: official Nuclear Blast announcement, 30 October 2026. Featured image: illustrative photograph by Niilo Isotalo, used under the Unsplash License; it does not depict Green Lung.