Following her second album, Wisconsin, Carlie Hanson has returned with her too late to cry EP. Its creation travels back to 2023, when Hanson was in a “gray area of writing” as Wisconsin neared completion and she began to dream up songs for her next project. “Shortly after the release of Wisconsin, I was dropped from my first record deal and became independent,” she explains.” It was a difficult thing to understand because I thought I had just brought my best work to the table. But times were changing, and I accepted that.
“At first, I was frustrated and let down,” Hanson continues. “But I soon came to find out that this was not an uncommon thing artists go through, and it could be a blessing in disguise. I was excited to have more creative control. It’s too late to cry really is the theme of this project. You can’t dwell on loss forever — you gotta keep moving forward, continue to grow, and move past the hurt.”
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Though all the songs wrap around that pain and rebound, “covering faces” — a deeply cathartic cut about discarding toxic relationships — embodies the EP’s themes best. “There are a lot of people who are no longer in my life that once were, and I thought they were sticking around forever. This is kind of that ‘fuck you, I never needed you anyway’ song of the EP,” Hanson says. The track comes with a video directed by Erik Rojas and shot in Tokyo, shifting between Hanson riding subways, wading through busy streets, and losing herself in karaoke with a stranger. It’s a journey from gloomy solitude to unexpected connection that captures the weight of her next chapter.
Stream her too late to cry EP, as well as the video for “covering faces,” below.