Released: 22nd May 2020
Rating: ★★★★
Best Ex, the artist formally known as Candy Hearts, shakes off her pop-punk history with her second EP. While 2017’s ‘Ice Cream Anti-Social’ took the buoyancy of her Warped Tour past to her bedroom, all diary entry confessionals and the joy of a hairbrush microphone, ‘Good At Feeling Bad’ is a jukebox love affair.
Free from the shackles of her former life, ‘Good At Feeling Bad’ is an energetic shuffle where anything goes. Opening track ‘Gap Tooth (On My Mind)’ lures you in with a sugary postcard to a far away ex, “how could I become someone you hated, fell in love with all your flaws,” before exploding into a tropical pop banger, all flashing lights and Love Island getaways. “I’m terrified,” sings Mariel, but you wouldn’t know it.
The other five tracks are just as excitable. ‘Lemons’ is a hurried anthem of self-love and “being my own best friend” in the same bubbling spirit as Diet Cig while ‘Bad Love’ is a brooding emo-pop number that howls at the moon, deliberate and self-assured as “a schoolgirl crush” goes sour. The chorus of ‘Feed The Sharks’ is ridiculously catchy, TikTok meets ‘Baby Shark’, while the verses swirl with an atmospheric vulnerability. Across the EP, Best Ex offers a chunk of her heart and a reason to have a good time. ‘Two Of Us’ is a moment of quiet, piano-led reflection, “we’re both broken in the same places,” with nowhere to hide before the closing riot of the title track provides an explosive burst of joyful escapism.
‘Good At Feeling Bad’ might only clock in around the twenty-minute mark but Best Ex doesn’t let a second go to waste. Always striving for more, always with a trick up its sleeve, it’s a rainbow blitz of brilliance.
Ali Shutler
