Courtney Barnett - The Comeback of Slacker Aesthetics

If there's one songwriter who, better than anyone else, managed to embody the essence of slacker culture in the 2010s, it's undoubtedly Courtney Melba Barnett, born in Sydney, Australia, on November 3, 1987, who quickly rose to become a cult figure of the global indie scene, putting into music and words the feelings, emotions and lifestyle of her own generation.

While studying at the Tasmanian School of Art, in the town of Hobart, young Courtney developed musically at home by soaking up both records by the best American alt-rock bands and those by songwriters from her homeland, such as Darren Hanlon and the better-known Paul Kelly, who would prove a major influence on her early songwriting.

By the dawn of the 2010s she was already playing guitar in a Melbourne garage band with grunge leanings, Rapid Transit, who would release a self-titled album distributed only on cassette, later becoming a cult object. While supporting herself by delivering pizzas, at 24 Courtney joined the psych-country band Immigrant Union, a side project of Brent DeBoer of the Dandy Warhols. With them she took part in the recording of the second album, Anyway, playing mostly slide guitar and contributing backing vocals. DeBoer returned the favor by playing drums on his friend's first EP.

I've Got A Friend Called Emily Ferris is Courtney's absolute debut as a solo artist, six tracks released in April 2012 on her own newly founded label, Milk! Records. The young songwriter may still show some artistically unpolished edges, but her vision is already clear: that of a new DIY-aesthetic rocker intent on self-producing her work while proving she had expertly absorbed all the best of the alt-rock and grunge scene of the '90s. The opening "Lance Jr." is an amusing answer to "Lance" by the Dandy Warhols, performed as if Cat Power were singing over the chords of "Polly" by Nirvana. In the following "Are You Looking After Yourself" the reference point is instead early PJ Harvey (though the instrumental coda is very Pavement), featuring one of the lyrics that would make Courtney the new heroine of slacker-rock.

Also aesthetically slacker is the video shot to promote "Scotty Says" (where her voice edges toward a kind of Sheryl Crow), which portrays a couple in a state of amiable idleness through the streets of a small provincial town. "Canned Tomatoes", on the other hand, is an attempt to merge the sound of Yo La Tengo (complete with dissonant guitar walls) with the vocal style of Stereolab: there are plenty of ingredients, in short, almost all drawn from that never-forgotten decade of the '90s, even by those who, for reasons of age, couldn't experience it firsthand. Barnett's look reflects all the tidy scruffiness of that era, paired with an ordinary haircut, a fresh-scrubbed face and plenty of sarcasm chewed over during long idle afternoons, channeled into songs that sound terrific while still retaining every trademark of the lo-fi approach — perfectly crafted songs, even if they don't stand out for originality.

A year later (October 2013) came another six-track EP, How To Carve A Carrot Into A Rose. From the opening "Out Of The Woodwork" onward, Barnett's compositional growth is evident, balanced between the introspective songwriting of Elliott Smith and that veil of alluring mystery somewhere between Hope Sandoval and an alternative-circuit Lana Del Rey. "Avant Gardener" is her first small hit, which began to make her known beyond Australia's borders, helped in no small part by its inclusion in the hugely successful TV series "Bojack Horseman".

"History Eraser" once again recalls Nirvana, but with lyrics unfolding at length, almost like an apocryphal Dylan; "David", instead, merges the David Bowie of "Jean Genie" with the Doors of "Love Me Two Times", blending it all for the enjoyment of American college kids. The slow closing track "Anonymous Club" would, four years later, find its way into the soundtrack of the film "In The Fade", which won awards both at the Cannes Film Festival (where Diane Kruger took home Best Actress) and at the Golden Globes (Best Foreign Language Film).

In 2014 came a deal with Marathon Records, the label that would reissue her first two EPs — which had quickly become cult records of the indie scene — in a single release titled The Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas, effectively the Australian songwriter's first album, which was also distributed in the United States in 2014, earning excellent reviews from music critics.

In 2013 Courtney played guitar on Jen Cloher's third album, "In Blood Memory", released by Milk! Records. It marked the beginning of a collaboration that would run parallel to the romantic relationship linking the two singers until 2018.

In 2014 the previously unreleased "Pickles From The Jar" was included on the compilation "A Pair Of Pears With Shadows", put out by Milk! Records to showcase its roster of talent. The experiment was repeated two years later, when the lively "Three Packs A Day" appeared on the compilation "Good For You". That same year Courtney was invited by Bryce Dessner to take part in the monster tribute to the Grateful Dead, "Day Of The Dead", for which she recorded her own cover of "New Speedway Boogie".

But the album that would change the young singer-songwriter's fate arrived in mid-March 2015: Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, a title whose length mirrors the adorable rambling found in her lyrics, which always reveal the touch of a sharp writer and a brilliant observer. The album was recorded in Melbourne in just eight days: to keep the songs' freshness intact, she only let the band hear them right before playing them, even though the meticulous writing process had taken about a year. Released worldwide simultaneously, through the labels House Anxiety and Mom + Pop, the album embodies the author's lucid stream of consciousness right from the opening tracks "Elevator Operator" and "Pedestrian At Best", the latter marking the first time Courtney achieved worldwide success.

The artist – also responsible for the artwork – moves between liberating guitar strumming and charming insolence, delivering the eternal indecision of "Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go To The Party", the Kim Deal-like mood submerged in the lysergic acid of "Small Poppies", the Velvet-esque, brushed alt-country of "Depreston", the Mtv Generation power-pop of "Aqua Profunda!" and "Debbie Downer", and the lysergic aromas – somewhere between Velvet Underground and Doors – of "Kim's Caravan".

The double-vinyl deluxe edition includes as a bonus the slow, psychedelic "Stair Androids & Valley Um…", originally inserted as a ghost track on the Australian edition of the record. One track from Sometimes I Sit, "Boxing Day Blues", would be reworked a few months later in a more rock-oriented key together with Jack White, becoming part of the Blue Series released by Third Man Records, the Nashville-based label founded by White himself. This "Revisited" version would be distributed as a 7", including a cover of "Shivers", a song by Rowland S. Howard, guitarist of the Birthday Party, who died in 2009.

Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit climbed to fourth place on Australia's best-selling albums chart, landed at number thirty-nine on the year-end chart, and went gold thanks to 35,000 copies sold. Nominated in eight categories at the ARIA Music Awards, Australia's version of the Grammys, it won four of them: "Breakthrough Artist", "Best Female Artist", "Best Independent Release" and "Best Cover". It missed out, however, on "Album Of The Year" and "Best Rock Album", losing to "Currents" by Tame Impala.

Abroad, the album reached number sixteen on the UK charts (earning a nomination at the Brit Awards for "Best International Female"), topped Billboard's independent albums chart, and even received a prestigious Grammy nomination for "Best New Artist". Sealing her fame in America, in May 2016 she appeared as a guest on Jimmy Fallon's hugely popular Tonight Show, returning two years later to present her next album.

In November 2016, Live At Electric Lady Studios was released, featuring six of the most representative tracks from her first two EPs, here given new life by the energy she unleashes on stage. Live, as in the studio, she is backed by Dave Mudie on drums, Bones Sloane on bass, and often by Dan Luscombe of the Drones on guitar, who has also co-produced all of her albums. When Luscombe isn't available, the band almost always performs as a trio, with Courtney handling all the guitar parts herself.

In May 2017, "How To Boil An Egg" was released, a previously unreleased single that hadn't found a place in the singer-songwriter's earlier work. The track could be purchased by subscribing to the Split Singles Club project, a series created by the independent labels Milk! Records and Bedroom Suck.

In the meantime, Courtney had become a minor star of the indie circuit, and after meeting her artistic kindred spirit Kurt Vile, she wrote and recorded a collaborative album with him, one of the year's most anticipated releases. But on Lotta Sea Lice, released in 2017, the flannel-clad duo indulge – as one might expect, knowing the two of them – in a few too many longueurs. The collective imagination revives the romantic memory of a Courtney and a Kurt joined together, even though the nine songs included here rarely have the strength to live up to fans' very high expectations, with the exception of a few standout moments, such as "Over Everything" and "Outta The Woodwork". Musician friends take part in the recordings, notably Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint and Mick Harvey.

For much of the record, it feels like listening to the recordings of an afternoon spent overdoing it on soft drugs, with the microphone left running while they idly strummed away on the sofa to kill time. Compared to Vile's solo work, Courtney's presence brings a healthy sense of discontinuity, embodied also by a couple of tracks sung solo, "On Script" and "Peepin' Tom", the latter accompanied only by guitar.

Lotta Sea Lice, while not leaving much substance behind, still helps crystallize Barnett's stray, sincere talent. A talent that here is not expressed at its full potential, in songs that pulse but feel unfinished, struggling to get under the listener's skin, lacking any hook worth remembering.

In 2018 came Tell Me How You Really Feel, which confirmed Courtney as one of the golden girls of the international alt-rock scene. Her grunge/alternative soul continues to emerge strongly, especially on the more driving tracks like "Charity" and "Nameless, Faceless", or on "I'm Not Your Mother, I'm Not Your Bitch", which even turns her into a riot grrrl for a couple of minutes. More concise than in the past when it comes to lyrics, Barnett seems intent on gently broadening her stylistic horizons, nailing, among other things, the ballad of a lifetime with the formal perfection of "Need A Little Time", structured in the manner of "Scar Tissue": verse–chorus–brief guitar solo.

The subtle feedback that tears through the final part of the sly "Hopefulessness", the sonic approach of "City Looks Pretty" and the roots languor of "Sunday Roats" are other ingredients of an album that fails to surpass her debut only because it tends to flatten out slightly toward the end. Important but not overly prominent guests include sisters Kim and Kelly Deal (Breeders).

Tell Me How You Really Feel performed well on the charts, reaching number two in Australia, number nine in the UK, and number twenty-two on the American Billboard 200. The album racked up nominations at the ARIA Awards, nine in total, winning two prizes in the categories "Best Rock Album" and "Engineer Of The Year", for the studio work done by Burke Reid.

In 2019, Courtney headlined bills at many of the most important and influential festivals, both in Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic, from "our own" Beaches Brew to Primavera Sound in Barcelona, all the way to the ill-fated Woodstock 50, cancelled just weeks before it was due to take place.

Between one stage and the next, Courtney never stopped putting out new music: hence the singles "Small Talk", a previously unreleased track included on the compilation "10 Years Of Mom + Pop" (October 2018), and "Everybody Here Hates You", released in April 2019 for Record Store Day, with "Small Talk" as its B-side.

In October 2019, she released a streaming cover of Loose Tooth's "Keep On", included on the compilation Milk On Milk, put out by Milk! Records and made available on the following 15 November. The compilation features nine tracks in which the artists cover each other's songs. Evelyn Ida Morris takes on the task of reworking "Nameless, Faceless".

In the November issue of the British specialist magazine Uncut, a Wilco tribute compilation, Wilco Vered, was included as a covermount, featuring a host of major artists. Courtney Barnett contributes her own version of "Dawned On Me".

The year closes out with the release of an MTV Unplugged, recorded in Melbourne on 22 October. Eight tracks performed acoustically, as per the format's tradition, foreshadowing a tour Courtney is planning for 2020 that will see her perform solo, with just voice, guitar and little else. Available in streaming from 6 December, the physical edition was released starting 21 February 2020.

The atmosphere is intimate, with the sound of strings stepping in to fill all the space left open by the absence of electricity. Despite the fine performances, some of the power of the originals is inevitably lost, and it's hard to prefer "Depreston", "Avant Gardener" and "Sunday Roast" to their already familiar versions. The case of the one unreleased track, "Untitled (Play It On Again)", is different, as it's presented for the first time directly in acoustic form. "Nameless Faceless" is performed with the sole accompaniment of piano, played by her friend Evelyn Ida Morris.

Alongside Courtney are her trusty bandmates Dave Mudie and Bones Sloane, while on cello we find Lucy Waldron. Also lending prestige to the show are Paul Kelly on the country ballad "Charcoal Lane" (a cover of Australian songwriter Archie Roach) and New Zealand crooner Marlon Williams on "Not Only I" (a cover of the all-female aussie supergroup Seeker Lover Keeper). But the track to remember is the successful cover of "So Long Marianne", a heartfelt tribute to the unforgettable Leonard Cohen.

2020, marked by the drama of the Covid-19 pandemic, puts a halt to the singer-songwriter's planned live activity; in August she releases "Just For You", a cover of a 2007 song by Kev Carmody, included on Cannot Buy My Soul, a tribute album to the Australian songwriter released by EMI Australia on 21 August.

That same month Barnett appears alongside Phoebe Bridgers for a version of "Everything Is Free", a Gillian Welch cover, performed during the virtual edition of the Newport Folk Festival 2020. Courtney has also announced her intention to create the soundtrack for the forthcoming documentary "Brazen Hussies", which aims to tell the story of the Australian Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

In 2021 come two more covers, both made in collaboration with Vagabon: in January her own take on Tim Hardin's "Reason To Believe", and in April "Don't Do It" by Sharon Van Etten, included on the reissue of "Epic".

Courtney had spent the months immediately preceding the outbreak of the health emergency amid frantic tours around the globe, worry over the fires devastating her native Australia, a couple of painful bereavements, and the fallout from the end of her relationship with fellow songwriter Jen Cloher, which came to a close in 2018. It's against this far-from-comforting backdrop that the ten tracks making up her third album were born: Things Take Time, Take Time, released on 12 November 2021, fittingly the most intimate and introspective record of her career. Not exactly a stripped-down work, but certainly less arranged and electric than its predecessors. Entirely played and produced together with Stella Mozgawa, drummer of Warpaint, Things Take Time, Take Time confirms Courtney's vaguely bored slacker attitude, amplified by finding herself forced to watch the world go by from a window for days on end, a situation that nonetheless does nothing to dampen the rambling irony that has always defined her lyrics.

With a loose, swaying gait like a sun-drenched late afternoon, Barnett tucks grunge roughness and studio perfectionism into a corner to aim straight for essentiality. The problem is that this time the quality of the songs doesn't quite match the rest of her catalogue. Among the standout moments are the lovely roundness of lead single "Rae Street" and the brilliant "Write A List Of Things To Look Forward To", and even more so the closing section of "Turning Green", where she finally indulges in an intriguing guitar excursion without ever overdoing it. Having shot to number five on the Australian charts, the album nonetheless failed to crack the upper reaches of the charts in the UK and US: perhaps it simply wasn't the record the world was expecting from her this time around.

Following the release of "Things Take Time, Take Time", director Danny Coen follows Courtney Barnett on tour with the aim of documenting the Australian singer-songwriter's life on the road, a piece of reportage meant to portray her intimately, hiding nothing, not even the hardest moments—a diary capable of capturing both life's images and the protagonist's own reflections. The end result is the film "Anonymous Club", which finds a fitting companion piece in End Of The Day, a sort of soundtrack released in September 2023.

Contemplative and minimal, the seventeen brief instrumental pieces, created in close collaboration with Stella Mozgawa, stake everything on gentle guitars and ultra-soft synth beds, dispensing serenity and inviting listeners to try living at a slower pace for at least half an hour, free from the stress clogging up our frantic daily lives.

End Of The Day stands as one of the last releases on Milk! Records, the Melbourne-based label Barnett herself founded in 2012, with the aim not only of releasing her own music independently and without compromise (right from her debut EP), but also of proactively helping launch new artists, many of them hailing from the land Down Under. In eleven years, Milk! Records put out more than seventy records, winning the AIR Award for best indie label twice, in 2015 and 2018. The label's run came to an end due to "persistent financial concerns", worsened by the difficult pandemic period.

Courtney Barnett signs with Fiction Records, part of the Virgin group, through which she releases Creature Of Habit in March 2026, her first work conceived after relocating from Melbourne to Los Angeles. The changes haven't altered the Australian songwriter's style. On one hand, she scratches at the walls of her own isolation with jittery forays ("Stay In Your Lane"); on the other, the pursuit of the perfect melody leads her to craft thoroughly pop songs (the bittersweet ballad "Wonder"), while also indulging in fine touches that look in several directions at once: the alt-country of "Site Unseen", shared with Waxahatchee; the long guitar solos that suddenly bolster songs that are only seemingly nondescript ("One Thing At A Time"); and certain oblique trajectories written with a devotional image of Pavement on the nightstand, like those running through "Great Advice", one of the album's finest moments, with a Courtney Barnett who may sound familiar, but is as effective and entertaining as ever.

On Creature Of Habit, her descriptive gift remains intact, as if she were painting watercolours of urban life, elevating in an almost literary way the reassuring monotony of the same gestures repeated day after day: making coffee, watching dust suspended in a beam of sunlight, jotting down a couple of lines or strumming four chords for the next song. The aesthetics of the ordinary found its muse long ago, but today Courtney Barnett chooses the path of a more sophisticated introspection, turning daily routine not into a prison but into a magnifying glass through which to look even more deeply at herself and the world around her. Her indie-slacker-rock, her familiar stream of consciousness, becomes an existential philosophy, free however of the post-adolescent cynicism that so often plagues the genre. Courtney doesn't shift the boundaries of her stylistic territory, then, but chooses to dig deeper, compiling a sort of logbook of the stillness of our present day.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google