Courtney Barnett 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’s a hallmark of her craft: 2015’s skeptical ode to suburban living, “Depreston,” emphasizes the difficulty of feeling truly at home over alternating C and F-major-7 chords for five minutes. While she hasn’t 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’s underwhelming Things Take Time, Take Time, she’s tried to get unstuck through therapy, pottery classes, a Georgia O’Keeffe obsession, and a move from Australia to Los Angeles.
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—shaped by those repetitive guitars and a perpetual search for meaning—at times recalls Barnett’s collaboration with Kurt Vile. Take the wistful chords of “Mantis,” where she’s frustrated about living on autopilot and wants to get organized, while Andrew Sloane’s bassline chugs along and steadily ratchets up the pressure. “I got my head sorted, sort of/I keep going just because,” she intones. Emphasis on the “sort of.”
No score yet, be the first to add.
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 “Sugar Plum,” she apologizes but adds that “those words don’t come easy to me/So I’m looking for a little leniency,” a dose of humor on an otherwise restless tune. Scenic harmonies from Waxahatchee support “Site Unseen,” 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.
There are miles between where Barnett currently is and where she’d like to be, which remains the most enduring inspiration for her best material. When working in that vein, Barnett’s 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 two albums. For Creature of Habit, she teamed with John Congleton, who accompanies the least distinct of Barnett’s compositions with flat, clanging percussion and blown-out guitars. Lead single “Stay in Your Lane” is driven by a blown-raspberry bassline and chalky drums—an awkward, if appropriate, foundation for a song about taking one step forward and two steps back—while the flat-footed shuffle of “Same” unexpectedly arrives at ominous new wave synths. It only takes a minute of “Great Advice” before the garish claps and cowbell hits feel claustrophobic.
