Consistency is a cost and a virtue.
Courtney Barnett’s fourth record arrives with its thesis already printed on the cover, and the positioning is perhaps too tidy; Creature of Habit is an album about routine, inertia and the small negotiations by which a life holds its form. It is also, in a manoeuvre that comes across as either disarmingly honest or self-defeating, an album that behaves as such. Written in the wake of Barnett’s relocation from Melbourne to Los Angeles and the closure of Milk! Records, the label she co-founded in 2012 and wound down in 2023, the record reaches for the disorientation of a changed habitat; what it delivers antithetically is the comfort of a familiar one.
That comfort is not irrelevant. “Stay in Your Lane” opens the programme on a distorted bass-and-drum loop that comes across as a cinematic undertaking, the kind of composition that might score the first scene of an early-2000s film. Barnett’s voice sits low and slightly recessed in the mix, clear but kept at a remove, while the loop itself scarcely changes, ornamented with guitar riffs. Its real break is the chorus in which both drum and bass briefly give way. “Wonder” follows in a dreamier register, an acoustic ballad whose paranoia is rendered oddly weightless; “Mostly Patient” is the record’s most affecting moment, trading the kit for an arpeggiated electric guitar and a tenderness that edges, productively, toward shoegaze.
The difficulty is that these distinctions, once noted, do not necessarily multiply. By “One Thing At A Time,” which returns to a more classic pop-rock footing and closes on a delightful guitar solo occupying nearly a third of its length, the template has already hardened into something expected; the song is pleasant, and that pleasantness is thoroughly exploited. Barnett and her collaborators, principally Stella Mozgawa, settle early on a palette of acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, acoustic drum and drum machine amongst lightly handled percussions, and they seldom disturb it. The record hence enacts its own title with thoroughness and poetry.
The production, led by John Congleton and shared with Barnett, Mozgawa and Marta Salogni, is crisp and unfussy, and it serves Barnett’s priorities faithfully, which is to say it keeps the instrumentation in a supporting posture and the words in front. That is a defensible choice for a songwriter of her observational gifts, and listeners who come to Barnett primarily for the lyric will find the record generous, whilst those attending to the sound may find that it sometimes recedes precisely when it should hold attention. By “Another Beautiful Day,” the closing ambient keys read less as an arrival than as an admission that the album has, for some time, been idling. The lot renders in a tastefully angsty track list that accurately animates the ambition of a record called Creature of Habit: the production is indeed a sort of mise-en-abîme of such title, and the album is in that way most poetic.
What had been billed as the document of a jarring transition becomes in practice a record certainly revamping a past discography, but within its own terms much content to stay in its lane. The title is honest; Creature of Habit is the work of a writer too skilled to weigh herself with too many propositions at once, her wit sufficiently fostering the artistry contingent on a good record. On this observation still, it is perhaps too settled to surprise us fully on the flipside.
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