Its lyrics are about a past relationship in which Clairo felt compelled to alter and silence herself to be considered attractive; its lo-fi GarageBand production, consisting of a drum machine and synths, led to the song being deemed bedroom pop.

She soon signed to Fader Label with the help of her father, whom Reddit users accused of covertly engineering the song's success after discovering that he was a marketing executive, which led to her being criticized online as an "industry plant".

III, the third volume of a collection of cassette compilations highlighting female and non-binary indie rock acts by the blog The Le Sigh whose proceeds went toward the Transgender Law Center, which was released on August 4, 2017 through Father/Daughter Records and limited to 250 copies.

[14] Aimee Cliff of Dazed wrote that the lyrics "I could be a pretty girl/Shut up when you want me to" were "daintily scathing", while the Los Angeles Times' Mikael Wood called them "arch but tender" and Pitchfork's Katherine St. Asaph identified the lines as having "a sardonic popular-feminist message".

[5] It features her dancing in her bed and lip syncing to the song, including to a plastic toy of Gizmo from the 1984 film Gremlins and while drinking iced coffee from Dunkin' Donuts,[18] while variously wearing white earbuds, sweatshirts, sunglasses, pigtails, and no makeup, displaying her acne.

[8][24] While Katherine St. Asaph, for Pitchfork, commended the song's opening verse, in which she sings, "Polaroid of you dancing in my room/I think it was about noon/It's getting hard to understand how you felt in my hands", as "a precisely observed snapshot of the moment one notices there’s nothing anymore where heartbreak used to be" and "an early indicator that Claire Cottrill's heart lay in songwriting, not content production".

[10] On Billboard's list of the best LGBTQ songs of the 2010s, Stephen Daw wrote of "Pretty Girl" that Clairo "pairs her seemingly flippant style with poignant lyrics" and has "a wry, tongue-in-cheek sense of self" about gender roles.