While TV and movies often portray Los Angeles as a sunny wonderland, songwriters have been more willing to embrace the city’s dark side. From the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ode to L.A. loneliness, “Under the Bridge,” to the Decemberists’ warning in “Los Angeles, I’m Yours” that the city’s “hollowness will haunt you,” the struggle to survive in L.A. has inspired countless songs.

Indie/electropop musician Allie X is adding to that list with each song she releases from her forthcoming mini-album. Super Sunset, which will be out this fall, draws on the “dramatic ups and downs” she has experienced since moving to Los Angeles from Toronto in 2013. The second single, “Not So Bad in LA,” debuted this month. Despite the optimistic-sounding title, it’s about how life in and around Hollywood isn’t always what it seems.

“The day I wrote it, I woke up yet again in turmoil, broke down about something, and got in my car to do the dry cleaning,” she tells Playboy. As she was driving, she started thinking about her to-do list for the day, and how to an outsider, it might seem glamorous. She said to herself sarcastically, “Yeah, it’s not so bad in L.A.” and then started singing it in the car. She says of the song, “It speaks to the nature of the life that you live when you’re an artist trying to make it in Los Angeles. You’re surrounded by money, you’re surrounded by glamour, fucking perfect weather all the time, yet there’s such desperation, such a struggle and such an inner conflict that I feel and I know a lot of other artists feel.”

Born Alexandra Hughes, she was visiting a friend in Venice Beach when she first felt L.A.’s pull. She says, “Most people would say to that, ‘Well, yeah, it’s the music capital of the world and where pop music is written and where the whole industry is now, so if you’re not here, you’re probably thinking about moving here if you’re in the music industry.’”

For her, it wasn’t about any of that. “I just felt this sort of strange feeling that I had to be here.” To make it happen, she says, “I hustled my ass off.” Through a film internship in Canada, she got a flight to L.A., and found a place where she could crash for a couple weeks. She says, “I ended up sleeping on the floor of that house for six months and writing hundreds of songs, really trying to get something going—and it kind of worked.”

While Super Sunset is based on her real-life experiences, that doesn’t mean the songs are realistic portrayals. If you’ve seen any of Allie X’s music videos, from the surrealist “Catch” video featuring piles of nude mannequins, to the video for “Paper Love,” in which she plays a porcelain doll, you know she likes to experiment with her image. That holds true with Super Sunset..

“I’ve placed it all in this sort of 1980s, early 1990s-inspired environment, and I’ve taken different people that I’ve become and developed them into different characters,” she says. “There are a lot of wigs; there are a lot of alter-egos. It’s pretty much like if I made a Hollywood movie of my life in Hollywood.”

Beneath that eye-catching style, Alexandra Hughes has a deeper motive. She says, “My mission statement with this project—the Allie X project—has to do with identity and trying to understand who I actually am.” The “X” represents ambiguity. She explains, “There’s nobody out there that can say, ‘This is right, this is wrong,’ for sure, because life on earth is such a fucking mystery. I think, basically, it’s OK to be confused. The most important thing is to feel comfortable within yourself.”

She wears stylized outfits to exaggerate certain parts of her personality. “Usually on stage or in an interview or any sort of public thing, it’s the confidence part. I mean, I think people can relate. I feel so self-assured and confident sometime, and then other times I feel so disgusting that I can’t show my face to the world without bowing my head down.” Her creative process reflects her efforts toward self-acceptance. She says, “In the beginning, I was so terrified that I was going to get kicked out of L.A. or something, I wrote like a machine.”

Nowadays, she’s taking it a little easier. “I try to only write with people that I really feel connected to artistically and I don’t write every day. I use my time outside of the studio to become inspired. Writing can be a total bitch. It can be the shittiest feeling when you’re writing something and it’s not going anywhere and you’re lost. That’s something that I’m very used to.”

In Los Angeles, she’s had opportunities to work with people whose names she had been hearing for years, and she saw them struggle, too. She says, “It’s not like every song, every idea that comes out of their heads is a pop hit. Even the most successful pop writers that I know, they have hundreds of songs that go nowhere. It is really a job, and you really just have to put the hours in.” She and fellow songwriter Brett McLaughlin, who goes by Leland, worked with Troye Sivan on his two albums, Blue Neighborhood and the forthcoming Bloom.

Allie X describes it as one of her most fruitful and satisfying creative experiences. She says, “I’ll always write with Troye and anybody that I feel that same kind of collaboration and connection with, but for the moment, I’m really writing for myself. That’s what feels right.”

Some things about L.A. were just what she expected—“People are really fake here, and I did get jaded”—but one thing surprised her. “I found love here. That was completely not a goal and it just randomly happened.” That, too, is part of her L.A. journey, so it’s fitting that the final track on Super Sunset, “Focus,” is a love song. Super Sunset won’t be out until the fall, but Allie X plans to make the wait easier for her fans by releasing new singles from it monthly.

Allie X’s forthcoming work Super Sunset, featuring singles “Not So Bad” and “Focus,” is due out this fall. Preorder the album here. Allie X will be touring this summer, including at Chicago’s Lollapalooza*; for a full list of tour dates, visit AllieX.com.*