FEATURE: Best Ex on new EP, the dark reality of online harassment

By Annette Hansen

“I think I felt very tied into the world of pop punk in which I would release music that I love, but it would be like neither here nor there,” Mariel Loveland describes of Candy Hearts, her musical project’s previous identity.

These days her band functions under the moniker of Best Ex. With a fresh new identity for the project came a fresh new outlook on the art that went with it. Best Ex was an opportunity for Loveland to shed all the assumptions that came along with the name Candy Hearts and express herself authentically in the here and now.

“[Candy Hearts] wouldn’t be loud enough for the kid who saw us on tour when we were like with The Story So Far and New Found Glory,” Loveland explains. “They would think that it was too feminine, too soft. And the kid who liked pop, they would think we were too pop punk or whatever. I wanted to be able to do something that had no preconceived notions and could be whatever I wanted and I could make as many different types of music as I wanted and it be an entity that was not just in this little cage.”

The band took on their new identity in 2017 and released their first EP Ice Cream Anti-Social.

For Loveland, the transition from pop punk band to the more pop driven vibe that Best Ex currently encompasses was not an overnight process.

“I was still kind of transitioning away from our old sound, you know,” Loveland says. “[Ice Cream Anti-Social] sounds like a very clear middle ground where I was kind of experimenting with how I could make pop music.”

But having that first step into freedom helped Best Ex’s sound to continue to evolve. With the band’s upcoming EP Good At Feeling Bad due out May 22 via No Sleep Records, Loveland says she feels she achieved the creative goals she set early on.

“I feel like where I wanted to go is what [Good At Feeling Bad] is like,” Loveland describes. “I just wasn’t sure quite how to get there all the way because, you know, for many years I was just writing pop punk. It was almost like I could do it in my sleep.”

One thing that will likely never change, though, for Best Ex is the honest and narrative nature of the tunes they present. There’s a cathartic realness to listening to someone speak openly about the things they feel everyday. That’s the sort of tone Loveland aims to bring to listeners.

“I’m a writer before I’m a musician, so I spent years working on words and so that’s just very important to me,” Loveland expresses. “Not saying I’m Bruce Springsteen or anything, I wish I was even one percent Bruce Springsteen, but if you listen to him, the way he grounds all his songs in talking about real day to day experiences that are not particularly profound all of the time, I think that those are the things that really stick with people because it’s what they’re dealing with everyday.”

According to Loveland the honesty is much more raw this time around, “I think there were a lot of traumas that for years I didn’t really get to write about because when the worst thing that ever happened to me happened, we were not on an album cycle.”

With her latest music Loveland decided to open up about struggles that she kept bottled up, going beyond lovelorn tunes and expressing some of the deeper turmoils that she craved to express. Ultimately offering listeners into a glimpse of a more complicated set of stories.

“It might not sound like it but all the songs cut just a little bit deeper for me and I think that’s something that I’m really happy that I was able to do,” Loveland says. “I’m really happy that I was able to write about these things that were really difficult that I managed to, I think, get through.”

Going deeper than heartbreak, Loveland discusses her struggles with living a more public life in an age of internet supremacy and the power that comes from anonymity. For her this was something that felt more powerful than any break-up song.

“It’s the first time in a while where, I know there’s some love songs on it, but the overarching theme is not really about love or anything like that,” Loveland relays. “There are songs about like bullying and abuse and stuff like that, that I think is more gutting than being broken up with, even though being broken up with is one of the worst feelings you can possibly have if you love someone, but being constantly assaulted on the internet, that might be worse depending on how long it lasts.”

There’s a certain defenselessness that comes with living and building a career in the public. With that life comes an expectation to handle all forms of criticism, malicious or otherwise. We as the general population tend to see the public figures around us as not really like us, and in terms of social media, it creates a pretty frightening dynamic.

“Someone once told me in a popular band ‘never try to change someone’s mind when they’re talking trash because you’re never going to get anywhere’,” Loveland says. “You get to a certain point where it starts to bother you so much that you have to respond to someone, and you try to change their mind and it never works out.”

In this particular scenario, Loveland has had firsthand experience, “In one of the instances when I’ve done this someone’s told me ‘you’re a public figure so you put yourself up for this abuse and you deserve it’. It was like I’m not a human being and I think that’s just what people think.”

Despite the harshness of the world online, it seems that Loveland has used her experience to create the art that matters to her. Art that hopefully listeners can find some sense of solace in or at least a sense of being less alone.

“I want people to listen to [Good At Feeling Bad],” expresses Loveland. “I want everyone to love me. I want everyone to love this. I mean, honestly, why do we even release music? We make music for ourselves, but honestly why are you releasing it? Because you want people to adore it.”

Good At Feeling Bad Tracklisting: