After closing her scene-making record label and moving to the US, Barnett decamped to Joshua Tree – where she learned to slow down and make noise again
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n the early months of 2024, Courtney Barnett was living in the kind of limbo that usually precedes a major psychic shift. The Grammy-nominated Australian musician was bouncing between sublets as a transplant to Los Angeles – a city she still navigates via a mental map of Melbourne, the place that made her: “Silver Lake is kind of like Collingwood,” she says, laughing. She was simultaneously winding down Milk! Records, the independent label she co-founded more than a decade earlier, and writing her fourth record. Her head was spinning.
“It felt like the end of a chapter, and then the next chapter kind of began without me totally realising.”
That disorientation is the engine behind her new album, Creature of Habit. It opens with the synthy thrum of Stay in Your Lane, a track that addresses the friction of this transition with a characteristically blunt self-assessment: “Feels like I’m going backwards / Each day I preach my practice / And still it seems I wasn’t ready for this.”
