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Chat shit on social media as much as you like. Identify your audience, formulate your engagement, manufacture rage bait, monetise the feedback. That’s the creatively bankrupt industry dullard approach to which The Meffs are the truly authentic antidote. There’s still no replacement for crafting and polishing your trade on the road in rock’n’roll. There never will be.
Lily Hopkins (vocals, guitar) and Lewis Copsey (drums) of The Meffs have been gigging consistently for five years since their 2019 formation and continuing before, during and after their bolshie punk debut, 2024’s What A Life. And with second album Business, producer Dan Weller (of prog-metallers Sikth) has captured The Meffs at their confrontational best by delivering a triumphant near-live performance. The duo are also proof you don’t need a bad haircut slapping a Fender Precision to balance the treble; Business boasts more bottom end than a Brazilian butt lift.
The short, sharp blast of 64-second opener Dreamin’ – with Copsey pounding the toms like an over-stimulated Martin Atkins – kicks your head open from the upper teeth. What A Nightmare crashes into the back of it like a column of articulated lorries.
The real voice of Clacton, Hopkins screams her uncompromising yet insightful lyrics in a vernacular and style that even the most knuckleheaded small-boats obsessive could grasp: ‘Chaos precedes all great change, but all I see is great despair/You want your country back, lest we forget that we are culturally in debt’.
One of the greatest young songwriters in the UK today and determined to puncture her target like a silver bullet, Hopkins knows what she wants and is stopping for no one. An honours student of classic rock, she bends influences to her will, making them her very own. Throughout the sardonic So Modern (Keep Up) and irate Where Did It All Go Wrong, her vocal phrasing is inspired by her beloved Courtney Love and Hole.
The title track features Hopkins in full scathing acerbic mode, mocking music industry marketing prerequisites with biting sarcasm. Like The Cramps getting down at a funk party, Law is a serious bop and the 3:21 minutes (a prog-punk epic in The Meffs’ world) Like Gravity is a hurricane of wild, climate crisis-inducing riffs. Storm’s coming.
