niiice. - "Love Handlez"

Minneapolis' foremost party punx have announced a new EP and thought it fit to release a new song too. Great! niiice.'s first EP comes on the heels of last year's Try to Stay Positive, the group's debut.

"Love Handlez," our first selection from the forthcoming Never Better EP, keeps it real within niiice.'s wheelhouse. It starts off innocently enough, with a simplistic guitar line and crescendoing drums. But fortunately it only takes about 25 seconds to utterly blow the song's lid off. Emotions rush around in a bloody hurry and start screaming. It's a self-deprecating and snarky howl at the walls of an apartment that suddenly feels much smaller and emptier than before. When drowning in the sea of loneliness, knowledge is the most dangerous thing ("I know/that you're getting drunk without me/Sitting at home/and you're feeling real lonely/Surrounded by people/Who swear that they care about/you" goes part of the tongue-in-cheek refrain). Sometimes imagining the mirrored loneliness of a former lover brings relief; other times, it just brings about more vicious internal desolation. "And I can't see you/I can't see you" is the concluding realization of the song - much more apt given the previous two minutes of fire. They may be doing just as badly as you, even if they say otherwise, but that isn't enough to fill the void.

Instrumentally, the track is meat-and-potatoes grunge punk. I have a tendency to throw the label of "punk" around a bit freely, but niiice. keeps it good and heavy. The guitars chug and the drums shatter - just like they should. It echoes the formula of their recent contribution to Brace Cove Record's compilation Vol. 1. Light-heavy-breakdown-heavy. "Love Handlez" is cut short before it can repeat anything, which helps maintain the songwriting's emotional potency. None of the band's tracks released since their debut have cracked three minutes. To me, this implies that they're sharpening their ideas into razor edges before releasing them onto the world. Personally, I hope to see a mixture of both their bite-sized concentrations and the more varied tracks of Try to Stay Positive on the new EP. If "Love Handlez" is any indicator, we can be assured that niiice. will bring the heat.

Never Better will be released on March 1, 2019 via Brace Cove Records. Watch the "Love Handlez" music video below. It was shot by Kerrigan Carr. The EP's album art, which can be seen above, was done by Alexis Politz.