{"id":567401,"date":"2026-03-27T08:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-27T08:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/567401\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T08:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T08:20:09","slug":"courtney-barnett-creature-of-habit-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/567401\/","title":{"rendered":"Courtney Barnett: Creature of Habit Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtney Barnett<\/a> knows how to make two chords last a lifetime. Her sometimes slacker, sometimes twee rock takes recurring major sevenths and wrings them for all their existential meaning. It\u2019s a hallmark of her craft: 2015\u2019s skeptical ode to suburban living, \u201cDepreston<\/a>,\u201d emphasizes the difficulty of feeling truly at home over alternating C and F-major-7 chords for five minutes. While she hasn\u2019t offered character-driven, droll garage rock for a few albums, Barnett has doubled down on those circular, clean progressions to underline her pivot toward first-person narratives about feeling rudderless and looking for direction. Since 2021\u2019s underwhelming Things Take Time, Take Time<\/a>, she\u2019s tried to get unstuck through therapy, pottery classes, a Georgia O\u2019Keeffe obsession, and a move from Australia to Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

The result, Creature of Habit, plays like the soundtrack to a long drive on a desert highway, where all you can hear are the bumps and groans of the car, the rhythms of the pavement, and your thoughts. Appropriately, Barnett wrote much of it from a Joshua Tree sublet, while considering whether she wanted to keep making music. The sprawling, bittersweet atmosphere\u2014shaped by those repetitive guitars and a perpetual search for meaning\u2014at times recalls Barnett\u2019s collaboration<\/a> with Kurt Vile<\/a>. Take the wistful chords of \u201cMantis,\u201d where she\u2019s frustrated about living on autopilot and wants to get organized, while Andrew Sloane\u2019s bassline chugs along and steadily ratchets up the pressure. \u201cI got my head sorted, sort of\/I keep going just because,\u201d she intones. Emphasis on the \u201csort of.\u201d<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

Self-paralysis and indecision are hardly new subjects for Barnett. On Creature of Habit, she tries to get out of her head and considers how that stagnation affects friends and lovers. In \u201cSugar Plum,\u201d she apologizes but adds that \u201cthose words don\u2019t come easy to me\/So I\u2019m looking for a little leniency,\u201d a dose of humor on an otherwise restless tune. Scenic harmonies from Waxahatchee<\/a> support \u201cSite Unseen,\u201d where Barnett takes responsibility for all of her overthinking. The breezy acoustic guitars and sneaky pedal steel almost make her intention to change sounds easy, a rewarding tension underneath such a sunny song.<\/p>\n

There are miles between where Barnett currently is and where she\u2019d like to be, which remains the most enduring inspiration for her best material. When working in that vein, Barnett\u2019s journeys through self-doubt are well-matched with the stomping, meat-and-potatoes indie-rock production that Burke Reid and Dan Luscombe brought to her first<\/a> two<\/a> albums. For Creature of Habit, she teamed with John Congleton, who accompanies the least distinct of Barnett\u2019s compositions with flat, clanging percussion and blown-out guitars. Lead single \u201cStay in Your Lane\u201d is driven by a blown-raspberry bassline and chalky drums\u2014an awkward, if appropriate, foundation for a song about taking one step forward and two steps back\u2014while the flat-footed shuffle of \u201cSame\u201d unexpectedly arrives at ominous new wave synths. It only takes a minute of \u201cGreat Advice\u201d before the garish claps and cowbell hits feel claustrophobic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Courtney Barnett knows how to make two chords last a lifetime. Her sometimes slacker, sometimes twee rock takes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[12327,64,63,134,1672],"class_list":{"0":"post-567401","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}