Best Ex is releasing her music video for "The End" on October 6th, in combination with the release of her album With A Smile. Best Ex says that the song "The End" is built out of frustration for the state of the world.
Some information about Best Ex, who also goes by Mariel Loveland, is that living in the shadow of NYC in Northern New Jersey, she got her start battling it out in the rough and tumble suburban scene with her nostalgia-tinged punk outfit Candy Hearts in 2010. Within two short years, she went from playing basements across the East Coast to sharing the stage with pop punk heavyweights like Man Overboard, New Found Glory and Weezer. After a final stint on Vans Warped Tour in 2015, she adopted the moniker Best Ex, trading energetic guitars for fuzzed-out synths, dreamy acoustics and a melodic sweet tooth that rivaled Carly Rae Jepson's or Sky Ferreira's.
The album With A Smile as a whole features beautiful, tongue-in-cheek bedroom-pop gems that speak about the pressures society dictates how a woman should "be" (always smiling, always pleasant, always subservient... cue America Ferrera's monologue in the Barbie movie), BUT Mariel isn't afraid to pull punches either. For instance, the album's first single ("Tell Your Friends") hammers on the head with velcro hooks and lyrics that sound great cathartically screamed along ("You can tell your friends I'm crazy / I think that they already hate me / And I didn't know all the knots I was tying to you / Weighed down my wings / And I didn't know all the sh*t that you put me through / Was setting me free)."
This is what the artist says about her song "The End":
"The End isn’t so much a protest song, but more of a song built out of frustration for the state of the world. I wrote it during the pandemic, as I watched politicians transform a deadly disease into political rhetoric that emboldened the most selfish, hateful people in this country. I would ride my bike around Manhattan, passing the temporary morgues tucked away in the lush greenery of central park. I’d pass stores with windows boarded up from the protests. I felt like I was going crazy. I couldn’t understand how people were just living their lives pretending this was normal. While I was recording the song, Roe V. Wade was overturned. The day I tracked the vocals, there was another school shooting. Once again, the people in charge pretended they were powerless, as if the 200-year-old ink on the constitution was signed by God himself. All they could offer was a prayer. That’s why I added church bells at the end. I don’t know what the end of the world will sound like, but I know those people will be sitting in church pretending it had nothing to do with them. As a side note, I also wanted the chorus to sound sort of like (what I now is) an OCD fear loop. You’re asking yourself over and over again, is the world ending? No, it’s not. But it could be? Oh god what if it is?"
