Every album by Courtney Barnett ranked from worst to best
Nobody could accuse Courtney Barnett of being prolific, but she is remarkable in her consistent brilliance.
She’s been around for a while now, though it’s only been 11 years since her true studio debut album, the incredible Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I just Sit (some people would look at The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas from 2013 as something of an album of sorts, as well). Just three further solo albums have followed since 2015, although she has also released the brilliant collaborative album Lotta Sea Lice with Kurt Vile, an MTV Unplugged live album, the score for her must-watch 2021 movie Anonymous Club, which captured her working between albums, and she also toured continuously in that time, notching up numerous shows every year across North and South America, Europe, Asia and her native Australia.
Evidently, Barnett is not somebody who has a lot to say, but when she says anything at all, she says it well. In that way, you can hold her discography up against writers and singers like Leonard Cohen (whose ‘So Long, Marianne’ she does a gorgeous cover of), Tom Waits, Fiona Apple and Kate Bush. None of them ever released an album for the sake of it, either, but have they ever let you down when they did finally get around to putting out new music?
Barnett is back already this year with her latest release, and her first through Fiction Records, Creature of Habit. Like each of her other albums, it was well worth the wait between releases, and it sounds like an amalgamation of all the best bits of those previous works, while also managing to be an excellent expansion into new directions as well.
And it’s surely not just a recency bias that would place the new release towards the top of a list of her greatest releases, but the end result of all the hard work and hard miles she’s put in since her 2015 debut. But where does it rank alongside the rest of her records?
Ranking every album by Courtney Barnett:
‘End of the Day’ (2023)
An almost formless, drifting and lilting, atmospheric album of incidental and instrumental music, each of the songs here is taken from the score for Danny Cohen’s brilliant movie Anonymous Club. The best rock-bio/documentary since Dylan’s Dont Look Back came out in 1967, Anonymous Club follows Courtney Barnett on the road as she was working on a new record. End of the Day would be a good album to drift away and lose some time to, to soundtrack a meditation or some Zen ritual.
I’ll be honest, this is only on the list for the completists, and in order to bump all of the other albums up a spot higher.
‘Lotta Sea Lice’ (2017)
A match made in slacker-rock heaven, Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile are the perfect combination and are each a perfect foil for the other. Their playing, singing and writing complement each other to the point of almost even sounding like one cohesive artist, rather than two brilliant songwriters who are coming together.
The strongest track on the album is opener ‘Over Everything’, a somehow equal-parts propulsive and laid-back rolling exegesis of each of their working methods and relationship to the wider world. The pair have continued to team up sporadically, and performed the song together a couple of times live as recently as last year. Elsewhere on the album, the pair trade songs off each others but it is notable that all the strongest ones come when Barnett has done the writing, or takes the lead.
‘Things Take Time, Take Time’ (2021)
Things Take Time, Take Time is probably the album from Barnett’s core discography, that is, not counting End of the Day or Lotta Sea Lice, that differs the most from the rest, although, conversely, it also sees her return at times to the sound and styles last seen on her The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas.
Following on from the frenetic and at times almost grungey, certainly punk-infused Tell Me How You Really Feel, Things Take Time, Take Time felt a lot softer and more gentle by comparison. At first, that could make it feel less urgent and mean it leaves less of an instant impression on you, but these songs quietly get under your skin and burrow into your brain. Barnett’s writing is, as you’d expect it to be, impeccable across the record, and almost disarming in its casual brilliance. ‘Rae Street’, ‘Here’s The Thing’, ‘Before You Gotta Go’, ‘If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight’, ‘Write a List of Things to Look Forward to’ and ‘Oh the Night’ are all quintessential—and essential—Barnett.
‘Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit’ (2015)
Hear me out: this is one of the best albums of the 21st century, it’s just that Barnett has been so consistently brilliant that it’s still down here in third place.
‘Elevator Operator’ is an impossibly cool, lyrically brilliant and infectiously exciting way to start an album, with the combination of those lyrics and their delivery, the freshness of the sound, that incessant drum beat and the electric piano sound is just a perfect opener. Then, when you make it through the breathless first few minutes of the album, you’re dragged straight into the electrifying and urgent ‘Pedestrian at Best’. Barnett sings like a machine gun, and she’s never bettered lines like “I must admit I’ve made a mess of what should be a small success, but, I digress, at least I tried my very best I guess”.
Actually, there’s a very long list of lyrics I’d say she hasn’t ever bettered, but that is undoubtedly one of them. Some of them come later on this album, as on the incredible ‘Small Poppies’ and ‘Depreston’, the joyous ‘Aqua Profunda!’ or the ever-more-prescient ‘Kim’s Caravan’.
‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’ (2018)
If I were making a list of my favourite Courtney Barnett albums, this would be up in the number one spot. I’ve seen Barnett perform each of the songs from Tell Me How You Really Feel, often almost right straight through from start to finish, at shows all around London and in Nashville, at venues big and small, and each and every time at those shows, the songs were so incendiary, so thrilling, so life-and-soul-affirming and were performed with such an extra edge of energy and a complete surrendering to the song than anything else in the sets that they were unbeatable.
Maybe that’s why I’ve got this album up here in second place, or maybe it’s just because it’s a phenomenal record. It feels like the most Courtney Barnett album out of all of Courtney Barnett’s releases. It has the most conflicting internal battles; the most tension in the grooves and most blood on the tracks, and there is a constant battle between an unlikely sense of surety and inner-belief and Barnett’s more usual fare of vulnerability, crippling self-doubt and a general lack of confidence.
There’s also a fuller sound in these songs, and Barnett is singing better than on her debut, and her arrangements are more interesting than on the follow-up. The songs have more texture, depth and shading, so much more grit and so much guts. These songs can stand up by themselves individually and also work together as a perfect cohesive whole.
I didn’t think she was going to make a better album than this, until…
‘Creature of Habit’ (2026)
Her latest release, Creature of Habit, is not up here through any sense of recency bias or overexcitement at just having a new release from Barnett, but because it absolutely deserves to be.
Creature of Habit sounds both like an amalgamation and a collage of all the best bits of every Barnett release that went before it, but also, importantly, like an extension into something new, something wonderful. This is a supremely put together, incredibly well written, performed, recorded and produced album. Barnett’s writing is as sharp as ever (favourite lines include “Keep on getting in my own way”, “I’ve got my head sorted, sort of”, “I’m in over my head / yeah, I’m over my head” and the ridiculously audacious rhyme “I’m an amoeba / I’m gonna need ya to analyse me”).
If you want to hear some of Barnett’s best writing, this is the album you should reach for from now on. If you want to hear Barnett’s best, most interesting and most surprising guitar playing, this is the release for you. If you want to hear her loveliest melodies and vocal performances, then you know where to come.
Put simply, if you want to listen to the best bits of every Courtney Barnett album, all concentrated down into one album’s worth of ten fantastic, joyous, thoughtful and spiritually uplifting songs, then you need to listen to Creature of Habit.
