COURTNEY BARNETT - Creature Of Habit

Two events shaped the making of "Creature Of Habit". First, a change of address: Courtney Barnett chose to leave her native Melbourne and settle permanently in Los Angeles, one of those places in the world where it's important to be, because that's where things happen. On top of that, Courtney signed to Fiction, after the 2023 collapse of her own label, Milk! Records, brought down by what were described as "persistent financial concerns", a situation made worse by the difficult pandemic years. A Copernican revolution for an artist who seems almost "lazy" and supremely stable, yet one that hasn't really shaken up her creative core, since the ten songs on "Creature Of Habit" show no major stylistic turns compared to her past work.

On one hand, the Australian singer-songwriter claws at the walls of her own isolation with nervy excursions that draw on grunge ("Stay In Your Lane"); on the other, her pursuit of the perfect melody leads her to craft thoroughly pop songs (the bittersweet ballad "Wonder"), before indulging in refined detours 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 only seem anonymous at first ("One Thing At A Time"), and certain oblique trajectories written with a Pavement holy card on the nightstand, like those running through "Great Advice", one of the album's finest moments, with a Barnett who may sound familiar but is as sharp and engaging as ever.

On "Creature Of Habit", her descriptive gift remains intact, as if she were painting watercolors of urban life, elevating in an almost literary way the reassuring monotony of the same old gestures: making coffee, watching dust hang suspended in a shaft 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 these days Courtney Barnett opts for a more sophisticated introspection, turning everyday routine not into a prison but into a magnifying glass through which to look even deeper into herself and the world around her. Her indie-slacker-rock, her familiar stream of consciousness, becomes existential philosophy, free of the post-adolescent cynicism that so often plagues the genre. Courtney isn't pushing the boundaries of her stylistic comfort zone, then, but choosing to dig deeper, compiling a kind of logbook of our present-day stasis.

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31/03/2026