Into The Music
Courtney Barnett makes records that sound like she is thinking out loud, except the thinking is sharper than most people’s finished drafts. The Melbourne-born, Los Angeles-based songwriter has built a catalog over the last decade that operates on a specific frequency: low-key, observational, and quietly devastating when you are not paying close enough attention.
Her 2015 debut “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit” announced a songwriter who was interested in the texture of ordinary life in a way that felt new. She wrote about going to the doctor, about a swimming pool that did not exist, about a housemate who left and took all the furniture. These are not the subjects of rock songs, usually. In Barnett’s hands they became the only subjects that mattered.
The guitar playing helped. Barnett plays with a casual aggression that sits somewhere between lo-fi sloppiness and genuine precision, occupying the space where grunge left off in a way that did not feel nostalgic. She has citied Liz Phair, Kurt Cobain, and Kim Gordon as influences and you can hear all three without any of them dominating. She absorbed the tradition and made something that sounds like her.
Her 2018 collaboration with Kurt Vile, “Lotta Sea Lice,” showed a different side. Relaxed to the point of horizontal, two songwriters trading verses and trusting each other’s instincts. Her second solo album “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” the same year, pushed the distortion further and the lyrical focus inward, processing anxiety and self-doubt with a specificity that felt brave rather than navel-gazing.
She closed Milk! Records, her own label, in 2023 after a run that had supported a number of Australian artists. It was a loss, and she has spoken about it with the mix of grief and pragmatism that characterizes how she discusses most things. The label’s closure coincided with her move from Melbourne to Los Angeles, a geographical shift that would feed directly into her fourth album.
“Creature of Habit,” released March 27 on Mom + Pop Music, is the record made by someone who has relocated and is figuring out what she carried with her and what she left behind. Produced by John Congleton, it blends her signature guitar textures with some drum machine and synth, a slight expansion of the sonic palette without abandoning anything that made her worth following in the first place. Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee appears on “Site Unseen.” Flea and Floating Points are in the mix. The collaborators are well-chosen, present without taking over.
Barnett is the kind of artist the music world needs more of. Not flashy, not maximalist, not optimized for the thirty-second clip. Her songs reward full attention, repeated listens, and the willingness to sit with something before deciding what it means. “Creature of Habit” is doing exactly what her best work always does. It sounds simple until it does not.
