Courtney Barnett

Northern Beaches, Hobart, a pizza round

Courtney Melba Barnett was born in Sydney on 3 November 1987 and grew up on the city's Northern Beaches until her family moved to Hobart when she was sixteen. She finished school at St Michael's Collegiate and went on to the Tasmanian School of Art, and for a stretch of the years that followed she delivered pizzas while playing in Melbourne bands.

Rather than wait for a label, she started one. Milk! Records was set up in 2012 to put out her debut EP, I've Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris, and it became a small co-operative for the musicians around her. A second EP followed, and in August 2013 Marathon Artists bundled the two together as The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas for release outside Australia. Pitchfork made the lead single a Best New Track and Q named it Track of the Day — the point at which a self-released Melbourne record became an export.

The records that made the case

Her debut album proper, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, arrived in 2015 and took four ARIA Awards from eight nominations. Its reach went further than that: a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist followed in 2016, as did a Brit nomination for International Female Solo Artist. The songs that still carry the biggest rooms — 'Depreston', 'Pedestrian at Best', 'Elevator Operator', 'Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party' — all come from that record.

What followed spread out across formats and collaborators. Lotta Sea Lice, a duet album with Kurt Vile, came out on Matador in 2017. Tell Me How You Really Feel, harder-edged and less wry, followed in 2018. Things Take Time, Take Time, written and recorded in a far quieter register, arrived in 2021. Across all of them the method held steady: ordinary speech, close detail, and guitars doing the emotional work the lyrics decline to announce.

A documentary, a label closing, a new city

Something broke in the middle of that run. Anonymous Club, the documentary about her, premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2021, and watching it back was, she told The Forty-Five, surprisingly confronting: she saw 'a different part of myself and I didn't like it'. Her verdict on the film has since settled into something close to gratitude — 'if it didn't exist, then maybe I'd still be the same person as I was before'.

The rebuild was unglamorous and specific: therapy, regular exercise, new hobbies, less drinking — 'all the things I was convinced wouldn't make me feel better when I was in my 20s'. She learned to surf and took up pottery, starting things as a beginner on purpose. Milk! Records was wound up in 2023 after about twelve years, and she took that harder than expected, reading it at first as proof 'there was something that I had done wrong', before conceding it had freed her: 'liberated because I suddenly had this time and space to focus on my music'.

She moved from Melbourne to Los Angeles with her girlfriend and their dog. The record that came out of it, she has said, 'feels like the total opposite' of the one before, because she 'had just moved to America, and was on this new adventure, doing all these new things'.

Creature of Habit

Creature of Habit was recorded over roughly ten months from 2024 at Animal Rites in Los Angeles and Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, with John Congleton overseeing the sessions; production is credited to Congleton, Barnett, Stella Mozgawa and Marta Salogni. Ten songs, thirty-nine minutes, no padding. The spending anxiety that used to govern her decisions got overruled: making it meant 'ignoring the little voice in the back of my head that tells me I'm wasting money'.

'Stay in Your Lane' went out on 15 October 2025, 'Site Unseen' — a duet with Waxahatchee — on 20 January 2026, 'Mantis' and 'Sugar Plum' together on 25 February, and 'One Thing at a Time' on 24 March. The album followed on 27 March 2026 through Mom + Pop.

Reviews ran favourable rather than divided. Metacritic settled at 80 from the aggregated critics, with PopMatters at nine out of ten, Clash and Uncut both at eight, and Paste at a B. It reached number 29 on the UK albums chart and number six on the UK independent chart, 10 in Scotland, 19 in Australia, 34 in New Zealand and 25 on Billboard's Top Album Sales.

Where things stand, October 2026

The touring year has been long. North America opened on 1 May 2026 at Radio East in Austin and ran to Toronto on 22 May, then restarted in Cleveland on 11 August and finished at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on 29 August, with Momma, Truman Sinclair, Built to Spill and Zoh Amba supporting on selected nights.

The current leg is the twelve European and British dates: Berlin's Huxleys Neue Welt on 5 October, then Cologne, Utrecht, Brussels, Luxembourg and the Casino de Paris on 11 October, before six UK shows — Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom on 13 October, the Glasshouse in Gateshead on the 14th, Rock City in Nottingham on the 16th, Aviva Studios in Manchester on the 17th, Bristol Beacon on the 19th and the O2 Forum Kentish Town on the 20th.

Australia follows in November, her first run there in more than four years: the Tivoli in Brisbane on the 4th, the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on the 6th and the Palais Theatre in Melbourne on the 7th, with tickets having gone to Frontier members on 8 April and to general sale on 10 April. Creature of Habit is nominated for Best Rock Album at the 2026 ARIA Awards, held at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney on 18 November. Further out, the first wave of Treefort Music Fest's 2027 lineup, announced on 15 October 2026, has her booked for Boise between 31 March and 4 April.

The show as it plays now

On stage it remains a trio: Barnett on guitar and vocals, Bones Sloane on bass and Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint on drums, with Sloane and Mozgawa handling backing vocals. Setlist logs point at a consistent shape — across 52 recorded shows on this tour the typical set runs sixteen songs plus a three-song encore, opening with 'Stay in Your Lane' and closing on 'Nobody Really Cares If You Don't Go to the Party', which has ended roughly 48 of them.

The Boston show at Roadrunner on 13 May 2026 ran seventy minutes: fourteen songs, almost no stage talk, then an encore of 'Mostly Patient', 'Pedestrian at Best' and the usual closer. Momma and Truman Sinclair opened. One shout from the floor — 'We love you, Courtney! The Celtics suck, but you sure don't!' — went unanswered; the reviewer's reading was that she had decided the songs would do the talking.

Glasgow in mid-October got all ten Creature of Habit songs threaded through the back catalogue. SNACK's Marc Bean described a performer who is reticent offstage and not at all reticent on it: 'Every guitar solo of the night sees Barnett weave her way to the edge of the stage, thrusting her guitar back and forth like a weapon.' The Barrowland sang 'Depreston' back at her, 'Pedestrian at Best' hit hardest, and the review called it one of the standout gigs of 2026. In Los Angeles in August the encore had stretched to 'Canned Tomatoes (Whole)' with Zoh Amba sitting in, so the frame is firm without being sealed.