The sweetest life hides itself inside the ordinary, looks at a supermarket car park or a suburban front lawn or a panic attack in a vegetable garden and finds, coiled inside those minutes, the many somethings that enlarge and shrink our hours. Courtney Barnett has built her entire artistic life around that kind of looking; I do not think she reaches for the transcendent so much as inviting to enter her world through the side door, forgetting to kick off its shoes and trailing mud and turning on the tea kettle while asking if she wants a cup of tea. Over the course of her discography, Barnett has mapped a familiar-to-me interior life that is anxious, self-questioning, generous, and wry.

Her art is grounded in a fundamentally philosophical predicament: that consciousness and being are, for most of us, not a soaring and linear thing, but a circling one (more gull than albatross). We repeat ourselves, we retrace the same paths between the kitchen and the couch, between doubt and acceptance. From the very beginning, she’s explored what it means to be a thinking, feeling person who keeps doing the same things, keeps waking up in the same body with the same questions, and who must ongoingly find reasons to keep going.

Her band included just two others – Stella Mozgawa on drums, Bones on bass – and herself. Ordinarily, trios don’t fill the Anthem so well, but the songs (old and new) soared. They began with the new “Stay in Your Lane” (awesome live btw) and then moved through “City Looks Pretty” and into “Avant Gardener.” I have loved “Avant Gardener” since the first time I ever heard it on the Sea of Split Peas; it’s an alchemical song that turns an allergy attack (the swelling throat, the ambulance, the indignity of near-death in a garden) into a meditation on the space between who we imagine ourselves to be, how much control we actually have, and who we actually are when the body/work asserts itself; she captured the modern sense of helplessness, the way so many of us are reaching for the ordinary goodness of a small life and finding it suddenly – and absurdly – out of reach. It’s also got some of the best guitar moments of the last two decades (which is generally true of Courtney’s music at large). 

Throughout the night, Barnett and her band played almost as many songs from Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, but mostly featured the new album Creature of Habit. Creature of Habit, which released in March, is probably Barnett’s most autobiographically direct record, though in characteristic fashion it’s more observational than confessional. She wrote the album in the aftermath of two large upheavals: the dissolution of Milk! Records, the label she co-founded in 2012, and a relocation from Melbourne to Los Angeles. With this album, she seems to be examining the patterns of living – the shape of a life – and she herself (or maybe we ourselves as the listeners?) is the creature in question, and the habit in question is the habit of being a self. To me, it’s deeply existential music, but it’s also wry and almost a philosophical comedy about the difficulty of change in a consciousness shaped by its own (dis)continuities that is most recognizable in repetition. 

Listen to the single “Sight Unseen” feat Waxahatchee by Courtney Barnett:

Existence is so often crushing and hard. It is easy to think we can or should step off its road, to avoid living the life that’s right there. One has to work hard to make sure to go through existence rather than around it; you can end your years – almost by accident – not having lived the life you’ve been given, failing to take from your life any kind of direction. It’s true that sometimes life is taken from us – sexism, the state, racism, systemic identity mutilation – but more pernicious is how it is taken from us moment by moment by the shortcuts the world invites us to walk down. We trade living for ease and passage. We crave immediate (or at the least, quick) satisfactions in nearly all the facets of our lives. It is so, so hard to live a life under such an assault, and maybe all we have as a bulwark against it is intentional attention. 

I think that’s at the core of Courtney Barnett’s songs. Paying attention is living your life, even if it kinda sucks sometimes. 

The band began the show with “Stay in Your Lane” – also the opening track of the new album – and all I could do was smile in the pit as the song unfolded. It’s a strong song about being caught between the comfort of the familiar and the terror of the new. Barnett renders this tension through the language of the small and specific: the fish on a hook, the crying like a child would, the worst-case and best-case scenarios that cycle and cycle. It’s a song about inertia and the voices (internal and external) that conspire to keep us exactly where we are; it’s also a song that barrels forward. 

She played some of my favorites off the new album, including “Mantis”, “Sugar Plum”, “Wonder”, and “One Thing at a Time.” “Mantis” and “Sugar Plum” were my two initial favorites, but I think that “One Thing at a Time” might be the one I think about most often. It begins with an impasses and resolves into a guitar solo that is one of the best of her recorded career; I can’t quite explain it, but it feels like the guitar solo represents the narrator making a decision, and it’s affective both on record (where it feels like a transition) and in-person (where it feels like catharsis). 

This was an easy show to purposefully get a little lost inside. Go see her and her band. 

The setlist included:

Stay In Your Lane
City Looks Pretty
Avant Gardener
Small Poppies
Mantis
Site Unseen
Great Advice
Depreston
Elevator Operator
Sugar Plum
Wonder
Before You Gotta Go
One Thing at a Time

Encore:
Mostly Patient (Solo)
Pedestrian at Best
Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party

Catch more photos of Courtney Barnett and her stellar band at The Anthem on May 10, 2026. All photos are copyright Matt Ruppert:

And check out photos of Momma opening at The Anthem: