Once described as sounding like the Runaways fused with Carly Rae Jepsen, Australia’s Alex Lahey is part of a growing wave of female singer-songwriters who understand there’s an upside to life being less than fabulous. There’s gold to be mined from a mundane and semidepressive existence, especially when you’re a woman armed with a guitar.

So, like the great and critically adored Courtney Barnett and shit-hot upstart Lucy Dacus, Lahey often writes about what she knows, namely being a piss-broke artist and surviving ruinously dysfunctional relationships.

All this would be more of a downer than Kurt Cobain reading Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure if it didn’t come with a sweet hard-candy coating.

Catch Lahey at Fortune Sound Club on Wednesday (May 30), and life might actually seem worth living.