Best Ex – Living In Hell
“I realized that out of all the songs I had [for the album], there wasn’t a single fun breakup song, which is usually my trademark,” says Mariel Loveland of indie-pop project Best Ex. So naturally, she wrote one and gave karma a starring role. “Living In Hell” is the latest single from Best Ex’s forthcoming sophomore album Good Girl, out November 6, 2026 via Iodine Recordings.
Cathartic, darkly funny, and with just the right amount of pettiness to be satisfying, the song finds Loveland contemplating one of life’s most universally relatable fantasies: watching someone who hurt you get exactly what they deserve.
But there’s a catch. Loveland isn’t interested in elaborate revenge schemes, dramatic confrontations, or becoming an antihero. She’d simply like her former tormentor to experience a prolonged series of minor inconveniences. “I wanted to write something powerful, cathartic, and also kind of silly,” Loveland explains. “Like, what if you really do want to watch someone who deeply hurt you suffer, but not that badly? You’re not some supervillain. What if they suffered just enough to be continuously annoyed for the rest of their life? I could live with that.”
Perhaps the real revenge: is the realization that you don’t actually have to do anything. “When someone hurts you, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting them to feel the pain they caused you,” Loveland says. “But at a certain point, the ultimate closure is understanding that you don’t have to do anything.” She says that realization is at the heart of “Living In Hell.” “They can’t escape the way they treated you, because that’s how they treat themselves,” she says. “That’s what the song is about. That, and the sweet karma of them dropping their expensive phone and cracking the screen.”
As the final song written for Good Girl, “Living In Hell” was the playful missing ingredient that the album needed. While Good Girl explores the heavier realities of adulthood (anxiety, grief, identity, changing relationships, uncertainty, and the complicated process of figuring out who you are) the record also leaves room for humor, irreverence, and the occasional fantasy of someone else having a truly terrible day.
“Living In Hell” follows previously released singles “Good Girl,” examines the expectations placed on women to define themselves through their relationships to others, pushing back against the idea that women should be understood primarily as someone’s daughter, wife, or mother. “Is This It?” looks outward at the exhaustion of living through political division, misinformation, and an endless stream of alarming headlines, while “Sick Of Myself” turns inward, confronting the anxious self-questioning and insecurity that can make our own minds feel like their worst critics. More recently, “Losing Streak” offered a different kind of hard-earned perspective: accepting that life doesn’t always go according to plan and learning to “sift for gold” in the mess rather than obsessing over what can’t be changed.
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