With a vinyl repress of their most beloved record and a new track written for a found footage horror sequel, Froglord’s Benjamin reflects on building a mythology from scratch, playing Imax screens, and why getting pelted with plastic frogs is just part of the job…

Words by Felix Bartlett | June 01, 2026

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Benjamin is not easy to pin down. The frontman of Froglord occupies a world entirely of his own construction, one populated by amphibious deities, Mystic Swamps, and ecto plasma slime. It is a world he has been building since 2020, methodically, prolifically, and with complete conviction.

Froglord began in lockdown as a solitary creative impulse and has since grown into one of British heavy music’s most singular propositions. An all-consuming conceptual universe built on sludge and doom, found footage horror, environmental reckoning, and an awful lot of toy frogs lobbed at the stage.

“The clickbait gimmick has worked,” Benjamin says with a grin. “And then they see us and they’re like, oh mate, that was actually all right, wasn’t it? It’s backhanded, but I’ll take it.”

Benjamin started Froglord in lockdown, with little more than a general idea and time on his hands. What emerged was a first album, then the realisation that there might be something worth pursuing. By the time Froglord played Bloodstock in 2024, things had shifted. “That was a real corner for us,” he says. “Where things really started picking up.”

Since then, the band have toured consistently, made forays into European festivals, and released prolifically. Two albums since Bloodstock alone. “We live in the age of social media where attention spans are scarily short,” Ben notes. “So we need to churn it out.”

But Froglord is not merely a band. It is a mythology. A complete cosmological framework. The Froglord himself is an amphibious deity, sent by the gods of old to oversee and protect the Earth, reborn once every 10,000 years in the Mystic Swamp, bestowed with the powers of death, revision, and ecto plasma slime. The current story arc finds him awakening to confront the environmental destruction wrought by the Anthropocene, the age of humans.

“From the first album, I already had a general idea,” Benjamin explains. “We had the original trilogy of albums, and then we go to the prequel trilogy. And then we’ll eventually bring out the sixth, and then we’ll be bought out by Disney and we’ll do the sequel trilogies.”

He says this with a completely straight face. Or at least, as straight a face as a man who performs in a frog mask can manage.

The Mystic Toad, Froglord’s most sought-after release, originally pressed to just 100 copies, is finally getting the repress it has long deserved. Ben admits the band have resigned themselves to a certain fate. “It’s our most popular record. We’ve resigned to the fact we will always be living in the shadow of it. That’s fine.”

The delay has been practical as much as anything. For a small independent band, funding a second batch of vinyl in a year is not easy, particularly when you’re releasing at least one record annually regardless. But the timing has aligned with something unexpected: a brand new bonus track called Croak, written for the upcoming sequel to found footage horror film Frogman Returns.

The original Frogman was director Anthony Cousins’ first full-length feature, a found footage horror in the vein of Blair Witch. He emailed Ben cold in 2023. Benjamin didn’t even let him finish the pitch.

“Whatever your next question is, I’m in.”

The collaboration made immediate sense. Froglord had long cultivated a visual and aesthetic world adjacent to found footage horror, and the pairing felt instinctive rather than contrived. For Froglord’s mythology, Ben suggests the Frogman cryptid and the Froglord may well inhabit the same lore, perhaps in a slightly different timeline. The premiere for the first film was held at a decommissioned Imax screen at the Bristol Aquarium, where Forglord performed a live set before the screening, complete with a custom visualiser backdrop. “Getting to watch a found footage film on an Imax,” Benjamin says. “This is going to send people senseless.”

Froglord’s sound occupies the heavier end of the doom and sludge spectrum, and Benjamin is clear about the DNA. King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Infest The Rat’s Nest, and specifically the track Superbug, was the initial north star. “It’s always been my aspiration, my goal to try and create something that big and grand,” he says. “I haven’t succeeded. I think it will always pale in comparison.”

Rob Zombie, however, is perhaps the more telling reference point, not so much in the music as in the philosophy. The world-building, the visual language, the performance as ritual rather than mere concert. “We try and make it come through in the performance,” Benjamin explains. “The visual and the world-building around it.” When he puts the mask on, he says, it becomes something else entirely. Shamanic is the word he reaches for. “Sometimes I’m rolling my eyes back and I’m so into it.”

The live set draws in people who arrive sceptical. Festival crowds who clock the concept and assume novelty act, only to leave converted. “We do get a lot of people at our own shows who come up to the merch table and tell us it’s their first ever metal gig,” Benjamin says. “And if we can act as a gateway for people to eventually get onto, like, I Hate God… I’m happy with that.”

Like any band with a prolific discography, not everything has aged equally. Benjamin is refreshingly candid about Army of Frogs, an album he describes as proof of his brief, misguided obsession with complex time signatures. “I think if someone likes Army of Frogs, you know they’re a true OG fan, because I think that sucks.” He pauses. “We’re not good enough musicians to play a lot of it live. And also, we’re a doom band. You want the audience to have that rhythmic, ritual thing. If you make it too complicated, you’ve got to be very talented to pull it off and make it feel natural.”

Froglord is, he explains, primarily a one-frog endeavour. Around 90% of the material is written and recorded at home by Benjamin alone, before being handed to the rest of the band with a brisk: “Right, guys, you can learn this now.” About 70% of the full catalogue never makes it to the live set. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Benjamin shrugs. “It’s on the record.”

The track that means the most to him, though, is Herman, from the Metamorphosis album. It features a blues harmonica solo, something Ben had been playing for 15 years before Forglord gave him the context to make it work. “It was always a dream to incorporate that into some sort of metal kind of thing,” he says. “And then eventually you get to the point where you think, oh shit, this works. I can do it.”

The strangest live experience is not one Benjamin wants to locate geographically. A show, in an unnamed city, where the band walked onstage to their intro track and were immediately pelted with hard plastic miniature frogs. Not metaphorically. Literally pelted. “We all started getting pummeled by tiny bits of plastic. Someone had just got a bag of them and was lobbing them. They meant it in a very nice way. I’m sure the intentions were pure. But the execution was terrible.” He pauses. “I was tempted to turn the sound off. But we appreciate the enthusiasm.”

The summer ahead is full. A tour with Bat Sabbath, the Cancer Bats’ Black Sabbath-worshipping alter egos, sits at the top of the calendar, followed by festival appearances including Bloodstock and Steam Festival. A sixth album, completing the full conceptual cycle, is on the horizon. European touring is, Ben says, the next significant step. And then, presumably, Disney.

“We’ll hop to it,” he says, and then immediately winces at himself.

“We’ll hop to it,” he says, and then immediately winces at himself.

The Mystic Toad vinyl repress is available now, with bonus track Croak included.

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