The 10 best songs by Courtney Barnett
The somewhat understated demeanour of an artist like Courtney Barnett lends herself to a reductive description. ‘Slacker rock’ seems to be the label wilfully stamped on her music, for its modesty makes it hard for people to comprehend any effort that has gone into it. However, her quality as a musician is such that she makes the deeply profound and musically complex look worryingly easy.
She’s a bastion for the quiet, thoughtful type who can pack a punch with emotive, witty and raw storytelling. While that’s mainly paired with mid-tempo indie rock that does indeed bolster the opportunity for flippant critics to regard it as slacker rock, within her discography, there is a selection of slow finger-picked ballads and outright headbangers that ultimately make her one of modern music’s most rounded and interesting artists.
While Barnett is now an accomplished artist with several records to her name, including a collaboration with Kurt Vile, it’s her debut record Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit that remains her standout release—and largely populates our list of her greatest songs. A masterclass in post-modern storytelling combined with her signature jagged-edge melodies, it quietly thrust her forward as the voice of a generation.
Soon after, her collaboration with Kurt Vile, Lotta Sea Lice dropped before her stellar second album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, which saw her delicate whisper grow into a powerful roar, considering no subject or no person too big to address.
As stunning as her latest release, End of the Day, is, it was a score for her documentary Anonymous Club and is, therefore, a product of design. But it showcased her ability to evoke emotions without the sharpness of her words and embrace the ambient, making any future record that combines both these skills a tantalising prospect. In the meantime, here are some of her tracks we think are best.
Courtney Barnett’s 10 best songs:
‘Write A List Of Things To Look Forward To’
All the reasons that make Barnett a compelling musician are ultimately the same reasons she’d make a great friend. And while we might not be on coffee-sharing terms, it’s tender tracks like this that feel like the next best thing.
There’s a calmness in her vocals that makes the arm-around-the-shoulder advice feel as warm as the melody she lays the words on top. The track was inspired by advice shared by her friend in a bid to get out of a depressive funk; Barnett urges the listener to “Sit beside me / watch the world burn” in a line that perfectly depicts her ability to be desperately sad and quietly caring at the same time.
‘Anonymous Club’
One of her early releases, which was used as the subsequent title for her documentary, ‘Anonymous Club’, unashamedly showcases Barnett as the thoughtful introvert she is. It’s an early example of her sharp ability to pair emotionally evocative melodies with lyrics that represent it clearly.
The slow delivery of the lines “Turn your phone off, friend / You’re amongst friends and we don’t need no interruptions” is one of her most simple yet heart-achingly profound moments in her entire career. If our tenth track muses on the end of the world, ‘Anonymous Club’ is a fitting soundtrack and melodically envelopes its arm around you in an understated showing of emotional perfection.
‘City Looks Pretty’
At its finest, Barnett’s songwriting creates a cocoon of safe isolation from the outside world. In ‘City Looks Pretty’, her voice becomes the calm amid the metropolitan chaos, as she reflects on societal disconnection and physical stillness, all while an upbeat, whirring melody flurries around her.
While the majority of the track provides space for her to inject some energy into the electric guitar and provide playful melodies, the song’s reprise is a fun, Rolling Stones-esque wind down that hints to the psychedelic underbelly of her writing style.
‘Over Everything’
If there was ever a song that typified the potential greatness of a Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett collaboration, it’s ‘Over Everything’. Beautiful and jarring in equal measures, it showcases their unique ability to exist just outside the lines of normality, creating something unique yet familiar.
Their conversational vocal takes bring colour to the mundanity they discuss while playing second fiddle to their warring guitar parts, which are bursting with colour. It’s Americana, rough-edged folk, and indie rock in one fell swoop before finishing in a beautiful flurry of alternative euphoria.
‘Pedestrian At Best’
Showing she can be just as captivating when the amps are cranked up to ten, ‘Pedestrian At Best’ is a whirlwind of fun that allows Barnett’s stream of consciousness to slap you on either side of the face repeatedly.
You almost feel guilty for laughing at the witty quips packed into clever rhymes once you realise the track is an unrelenting diatribe of self-hatred. “I love you / I hate you / I’m on the fence / it all depends” sets the tone for a song steeped in inner conflict—self-love clashing with self-loathing, capturing the plaguing feelings of day-to-day existence. It’s a scattergun of a track with pinpoint accuracy, tearing through identity crises, philosophical theories, and fame, leaving them all in the dust by the end.
‘Elevator Operator’
If it weren’t for her astounding empathy, Barnett could write a killer diss track. Instead, she uses ‘Elevator Operator’ to turn the mundanity of a clammy lift into a sharp, compelling tale of misinterpretation and misplaced anxiety. Somehow, amid all its irreverence, the song manages to capture something deeply empathetic.
The musicality builds alongside the narrative tension, and it’s so enveloping you almost forget the compositional beauty Barnett has crafted. The guitar lines are rousing one moment, jangly the next, with interwoven percussive claps that turn the song into both a campfire storytime and a campfire singalong—all at once.
‘An Illustration of Loneliness’
Another track from her stellar debut album, it’s as alternative a love song as you’d expect from Barnett. While most lovers let their subject occupy every inch of their mind, Barnett drops admissions of thinking about them in between mundane contemplations. It’s a typically Barnett take on the familiar—one toe dipped in, the other shuffling back toward her own sense of comfort.
But more than that, it’s real. The tangents upon which her lustful mind explores are those we’ve all experienced in the sleepless twilight, laid upside down your bed with nothing left but shoddy moonlit handiwork to occupy your gaze. What Barnett has the patience to explore more than any other lyricist is the reality that it’s in that everyday mundanity that feelings of longing feel all the more profound.
‘Nameless, Faceless’
On this ‘Nameless, Faceless’, Barnett lived truly by the mission statement set out by her album title, Tell Me How You Really Feel. In contrast to the feminine and masculine experience, Barnett uses her signature wit and observational wisdom to plainly outline how misplaced men’s feelings of anger and fear are in the modern well.
Referencing Margaret Atwood to deliver the song’s most cutting verse, “I wanna walk through the park in the dark / Men are scared that women will laugh at them / I wanna walk through the park in the dark / Women are scared that men will kill them.” Barnett leaves no room for any sensible rebuttal in a chillingly accurate anthem. Behind the vocals is a suitably menacing melody that taunts in the intro and frightens in the reprise to leave no stone of criticism unturned.
‘Depreston’
It’s hard to imagine Barnett crafting this humble number with the hope that it would become the legacy-defining track it did. A straightforward re-telling of her own house-buying experience, it somehow becomes the ultimate existential anthem: what good is structural domesticity when everything is replaceable?
Within that simple idea, Barnett weaves in modern imagery to reflect the everyday realities of contemporary life—soaring living costs and the relentless carrot-dangle of commercialism. For such a muted recording, it stands out in any of Barnett’s live sets, with fans hanging on every line of what has become an anthem of collective catharsis. Whether she intended it or not, it proves Barnett’s quiet, transcendental ability to be the storytelling voice of a generation.
‘Avant Gardener’
All of Barnett’s finest qualities are packed into five minutes of indie-rock perfection. Sonically, it straddles the psychedelic and the calming, with wobbly guitar lines stabbing at her soothing vocals like a splinter to the head. In a track that somehow feels sprawling, there are still sharp vocal hooks that make it as catchy as it is explorative.
But it’s in the lyrics where this track truly flourishes. It’s a typically sharp, observational piece that has you gripping the edge of your seat—even as your foot taps and your head nods you closer to falling in. Following the story of a young girl caught in the grip of an anaphylaxis-induced panic attack, a desperate search for purpose slowly reveals itself beneath a tale as compelling as it is funny.
“The paramedic thinks I’m clever ’cause I play guitar / I think she’s clever ’cause she stops people dying” is classic Barnett—blunt, witty, and perfectly timed. And her comparison of an asthma puffer to smoking a bong shouldn’t feel as refined as it does, yet somehow, it lands effortlessly.
