Lydia Sutherland offers a colourful and complicated portrait of young womanhood on the aptly named pretty girls don’t cry, one of the first studio projects from the rising Canadian singer-songwriter. The EP opens with the Alli Walker collaboration “girls at the bar,” a sweet and catchy celebration of the kind of female camaraderie only found in a bar bathroom. The ballad “pretty girls” turns an unflinching eye toward the fallout of the unhealthy beauty standards often forced upon young women, like “sneaking diet pills from momma’s cupboards” and applying “two hours worth of Maybelline” before going to school. Sutherland isn’t afraid to lean on humour in her songwriting, either, like on the all-too-real alpha-male takedown “chad,” which pokes fun at the kind of guy who looks “like [he] just walked out of a college frat” and spends every day “spending daddy’s money.” And another standout, “too hot to be sad,” lets its narrator, rejected by a “boy [who] made the worst decision,” pump herself up with playful affirmations.