Courtney Barnett
Creature of Habit
MOM + POP
For anyone still shocked, offended, dislocated, or disheartened by usually spare-sounding Australian songwriting icon Courtney Barrett’s leaving Melbourne for LA and opening her woolly rock vibe up to fuller sounds and lyrical-emotional experimentation on 2021’s Things Take Time, Take Time, spring 2026 has perhaps been a moment of wish fulfillment. For Barnett’s new Creature of Habit feels like a tiny step to the left, then back, without being that big, tacit acknowledgement that testing one’s own waters—personally and aesthetically—feels frightening. In fact, Creature of Habit seems to use that back-and-forth fear of the new to its advantage, as a start point for further depth-diving and confession.
Still flatliningly deadpan (even thrillingly so; she’s 21st-century rock music’s Buster Keaton) through a sound as vast and broad as Joshua Tree—where Creature of Habit was penned with producer John Congleton and knotty, spiky guitars to match the landscape—Barnett ruminates on the positive self in a manner that would make her psychiatrist proud (“I got my head sorted, sort of” she sings on the yearningly toned “Mantis”). And yet Barnett still chooses to show that there’s enough room in her head for rueful self-doubt on the craggy “Stay in Your Lane,” while elsewhere exploring unblinking devotion to continued trust in romance (“Mostly Patient” and its wait for change) and admitting that self-doubt hasn’t been kind on her psyche, even if it was good for the business of youthful ennui, on “Site Unseen,” featuring a harmonic vocal assist from Waxahatchee. “Indecision’s never been of much help to me,” she quips.
So, deal with it Barnett-heads: Real change and fulfillment will come to your hero, even if it takes another album or two.
