Business is the second LP from UK Britpunk mob, The Meffs. The duo bring forth more fire and fury.

THE MEFFS

The Meffs deal in what they have cheerfully christened frantic Britpunk: the snot and swagger of classic UK punk welded to a modern, politically wired sensibility, all of it delivered with the volume and physicality of a band twice their number. That is the trick that has always astonished me about them. Two people. One guitar, one drum kit, one shared pair of lungs, and yet on record, and especially in the flesh, they conjure a racket that shames outfits with double the personnel and a fraction of the conviction. Hopkins plays and howls like the building is on fire and she is determined to go down singing; Copsey hits the kit as though it owes him money. There is no bass player, no safety net, no studio wizardry standing between you and the songs. What comes across, always, is honesty at high velocity.

EVERY GOOD PUNK STORY

Every good punk story starts DIY, and The Meffs’ is no exception. Hopkins, from Clacton, and Copsey, from Colchester, joined forces in 2019 and set about doing it the hard way: a rowdy self-titled effort released independently in 2020, a run of singles that kept them alive through the lockdown years, and a habit of hoovering up famous admirers along the way. Fat Mike of NOFX and Frank Turner both threw an arm around them early, and Turner liked them enough to produce their debut album proper, What A Life, in 2024, a record that did exactly what a debut should, announcing a fully formed identity at full pelt.

Then came the ascent in earnest: an arena tour supporting Alice Cooper, of all people; their own homegrown festival, Meff-Fest; and a 2025 that reads like a bucket list somebody actually finished: Glastonbury, Download, 2000trees, sold-out headline runs across the UK and Europe, and support slots alongside the genuine article in the Sex Pistols and The Undertones. Through all of it they have stayed loudly, proudly grassroots: patrons of the Music Venue Trust and evangelists for the small rooms that made them, a band who have never once forgotten which side of the barrier they came from. That groundwork is precisely why the fury of Business lands as earned rather than posturing.

ANGRY, UGLY & VULNERABLE

This brings us to the record itself. If What A Life was the sound of a band delighted simply to be here, Business is the sound of a band who have seen behind the curtain and have things to say about it. The duo describes the album as angry and ugly, vulnerable, and speaking for everyone, a portrait of work, war, politics and health, and they are not overselling it. This time the producer’s chair belongs to Dan Weller, and the results trade none of the live scuzz for gloss; if anything, the record hits harder than anything they have committed to tape before. Above all, it is a record about refusing to be packaged, about being told to be your authentic self only so long as that self is conveniently on brand, marketable, and quiet when it counts. The Meffs have no interest in any of that.

Dreamin’ throws the doors open with a deceptive little inhale before the room caves in, and it sets the template immediately: melody smuggled inside the mayhem, a chorus you are shouting back before you have consciously decided to. It is a canny way to start because it dangles the promise of something soaring and then makes you fight for it. What A Nightmare follows with all gnashing forward momentum and gallows humour, while Where Did It All Go Wrong? asks the question every disillusioned twenty-something has muttered into a pint and answers it with a riff rather than a shrug.

BUSINESS

The title track is the album’s mission statement and its lead single, and it is a beauty, a razored takedown of the gatekeeping and branding nonsense of the industry that the band, wonderfully, insist on calling a love song. There is real venom in it, but there is warmth too, the sound of two people who know exactly who they are, refusing to apologise for it. Law keeps the temperature up, and then comes Fight, which lasts roughly thirty seconds and does not waste a single one of them, a hardcore hand grenade with the pin already pulled, over before your brain has caught up with your feet. It is the most purely punk moment on the record and possibly the most fun.

Disorder (Wake Up) is the record’s clear-eyed state-of-the-world address, channelling the general sense that everything is on fire into something you can pogo to, which is precisely the alchemy punk was invented for. Love To Lose is the designated hype anthem, a fist-in-the-air rush built for the exact moment a sweaty room loses its collective mind, and So Modern (Keep Up), already a live favourite, arrives with all the scuzz and swagger of the stage intact, a song that sneers at the exhausting churn of keeping current while being, of course, ferociously catchy.

GOD COMPLEX

God Complex turns the blade outward at the self-appointed and the self-important, and then Like Gravity closes the record by turning it inward instead, a bout of the pair taking the knife to themselves that lands the album’s most vulnerable blow. It is the smartest sequencing decision here: after forty-odd minutes of shouting at the world, the pair finish by shouting at themselves, and the honesty of it is disarming. You come out the other side having been thoroughly kicked around and somehow feeling better for it.

What impresses me most about Business is how little The Meffs have compromised on the way up. The obvious move for a band riding this kind of momentum is to sand off the edges, chase the playlist, soften the message, and they have done the exact opposite, making the most confrontational, most physically direct record of their career at precisely the moment the safe option was most tempting. Weller’s production is the right call: it captures the sheer force of the live duo without prettifying it, so the album sounds less like a studio construction than a room you have accidentally wandered into halfway through a riot. Eleven songs, no filler, no fat, in and out before it outstays its welcome.

BIGGER, BUT NOT TAMER

Britain has always had a proud lineage of two-fisted, plain-speaking punk bands who mean every word, and on the evidence of this record, The Meffs are among the most vital that tradition has thrown up in years. They have managed the difficult balancing act of getting bigger without getting tamer, of playing arenas while still fighting for the toilet circuit that raised them, and of being furious, funny, and heartfelt often within the same thirty-second blast. In a scene that too often mistakes volume for meaning, they have both, and not one bar of this record sounds like a band coasting. Business is loud, it is ugly, it is defiant, and it is quietly one of the most generous punk records you will hear all year. Play it loud, play it often, and do not, whatever you do, try to put it in a box.

The Meffs: Website 

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