The face of punk in 2026, The Meffs are one of the hardest working acts out there, having blazed a trail touring with The Undertones and the Sex Pistols, unleashed hell with their own headline tour, and generally reminded an increasingly AI-addled populace that there is no substitute for the piss ‘n’ vinegar of genuine musicians ripping the shit out of their gear every night. For all these reasons and more, The Meffs are fucking awesome.
And now they’re back with Business. Produced by Dan Weller, it finds Lily Hopkins and Lewis Copsey once again proving themselves to be one of the most politically aware, musically ferocious punk bands currently treading the boards.
The album opens with Dreamin’. With Lewis’ thunderous drums, which are heavy enough even before Lily unleashes a barrage of anti-automation rhetoric and barely coherent riffing. It’s a short, brutally overloaded song that lands somewhere between Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop’s mix of Raw Power, and Endless Nameless-era Wildhearts. While the band slow the pace on What A Nightmare, they make up for this by ramping up the distortion still further. However, it’s Lily’s performance that really seals the deal. With vocals pitched somewhere between Keith Flint, Skin, and Kathleen Hanna, Lily has an attitude and energy that is irresistible. And yet, as the insanely catchy Where Did It All Go Wrong so ably shows, Lily can also handle more melodic fare with aplomb, the track emerging as a surprising mix of L7 (think Fuel My Fire) and Elastica.
Up next, the title track is so mired in distortion it’s a wonder the band’s amps didn’t melt. Meanwhile, with its cynical, spoken-word vocal, it nods to both Soft Play and Lambrini Girls, capturing a similar sense of weary disdain to the former band’s Punk’s Dead. As you might imagine for a band as anti-establishment as The Meffs, Law hardly paints its subject matter in a flattering light, although the track has a hook and groove to it that harks back to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ irresistible debut, albeit with a chorus that launches itself at the listener like a cruise missile. At just over thirty seconds in length, its follow-up, Fight, barely gets off the ground before Disorder (Wake Up) hurtles in to rearrange your nerve endings. Imagine Rage Against the Machine if they’d been born in Essex and you’re in the ballpark.
Short and sharp, Love To Lose has a loose grungy vibe to it that will excite anyone who grew up on Nirvana, while So Modern (Keep It Up) latches on to the same sense of bored detachment that powered Elastica’s most incisive moments. With the album racing to its conclusion, the stabbing riff of God Complex keeps you on your toes while its distorted, sneering vocal is just begging to unite the pit when the band play live. There’s just one last blast of feral punk to go. Like Gravity is, at three minutes and twenty seconds, the album’s longest song and The Meffs use the extra few seconds to deliver a schizophrenic finale that finds the duo shifting from melodic verse to an utterly explosive chorus with deft skill. It makes for a dynamic, deeply exciting finale to an album that grabs you by the lapels and screams into your face until it’s done.
There are times, usually when the site gets inundated with identikit bands, all churning out riffs with the same airbrushed production, that I question the state of modern music. It’s easy to become disheartened, especially now the opportunities to go into a bricks ‘n’ mortar record store and come out with an armful of unfamiliar artists have diminished. Yet, scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find the underground is teeming with bands like The Meffs who still remember what it is to plug into a battered amp and simply let go.
There truly is nothing like being confronted by a wall of noise that hits you physically and, with Business, The Meffs have effectively replicated the experience with a record that bristles with barely constrained rage. With Lily Hopkins once again proving to be an absolute monster behind the mic, Business delivers on every ounce of promise The Meffs have hitherto displayed, and it leaves you broken on the floor. Utterly fucking stunning. 9.5/10
