‘Making Me Cry’ is a restrained piece of alternative pop built around the difficult but familiar anxiety of the fear of disappointing the people closest to you.
Mali Mae approaches that subject without overcomplicating it. The song focuses on the emotional strain of wanting to make family proud while privately wondering whether your efforts are enough, allowing guilt, affection and insecurity to exist alongside one another.
Acoustic and electric guitars, bass and piano provide the foundation, with the instrumentation building in a way that mirrors the increasing pressure within the lyrics. The production remains relatively controlled, giving Mali’s vocal enough space to carry the song’s emotional weight without pushing the track into unnecessary melodrama.
There are hints of the directness associated with contemporary alt-pop and indie-rock, but ‘Making Me Cry’ is strongest when it stays focused on its own emotional detail. The song doesn’t try to turn its subject into a grand statement. Instead, it remains close to the feeling itself: the uncertainty of whether love and approval are being earned, maintained or somehow lost.
As a classically trained violinist and Royal Northern College of Music graduate, she brings a strong technical foundation to the project, but this material is less concerned with displaying virtuosity than with clarity. The instrumental choices support the songwriting rather than drawing attention away from it.
That approach also gives a clear indication of the direction behind new EP YOU’RE JUST MAKING ME CRY. If ‘Making Me Cry’ is representative of the wider project, the EP appears to be rooted in emotional processing rather than just dramatic reinvention. She’s using songwriting as a way to articulate thoughts that are difficult to express elsewhere, and the strength of this single lies in how directly that intention comes through.
Measured, personal and thoughtfully arranged, ‘Making Me Cry’ is a convincing step into a more emotionally open phase of Mali Mae’s work.