I love The Meffs. Their second album Business is exactly what I want from them: loud, furious, funny in the right places, political because there is quite a lot to be bloody angry about, but never so busy Making A Point that it forgets to be a great punk record.
Lily Hopkins and Lewis Copsey have absolutely no interest in smoothing off the edges. ‘Fight’ lasts 33 seconds, which is honestly refreshing in a world where far too many songs could have ended two minutes earlier. ‘Love To Lose’ flies past, ‘So Modern (Keep Up)’ has all the filthy guitar and live-wire energy that makes The Meffs such a ridiculous live band, and ‘Disorder (Wake Up)’ sounds appropriately fed up with the state of everything.
The title track might be the one that gets me most, though. It’s about the music industry’s favourite instruction: be authentic! No, not like that.
“We’re not hard enough but we’re not soft enough, we’re not queer enough but we’re too queer, we’re too rough but not rough enough.”
Yep. That.
‘Law’, meanwhile, goes straight for wealth, status and the apparently optional consequences available to people who have enough of either. There’s anger all over Business, but crucially there’s vulnerability too. Lily calls the album “a display of anger and vulnerability”, and that combination is what stops it becoming eleven tracks of shouting at the news.
Dan Weller’s production keeps everything satisfyingly grubby and alive. The drums hit like they should. The guitar sounds enormous. Nobody appears to have suggested making The Meffs a little more palatable, thank fuck.
Business sounds like a band who know exactly who they are and have finally run out of patience with anybody asking them to fit a different shape.
Which does raise one fairly obvious question: how the hell have The Meffs never played a LOUD WOMEN Fest? Lily, Lewis – can we fix that sometime please?
Find The Meffs on Instagram | Facebook