Creature of Habit is Courtney Barnett's quietest album, which is a relative distinction — by most indie rock standards, it's still pleasingly loud in places. But where Sometimes I Sit and Think traded in deadpan overload and Tell Me How You Really Feel tilted toward full riff-rock catharsis, Barnett's third full-length spends more time in a mid-register, conversational space that suits her natural wit and doesn't always show off her guitar.
That's both a strength and a potential limitation. 'Site Unseen,' the duet with Waxahatchee's Katie Crutchfield, is the album's peak — a warm, slightly melancholy song that Barnett describes as having taken four attempts over two years to finish. The patience shows. Crutchfield's high harmony sits exactly where Barnett's deadpan needs something to push against, and the guitar arrangement is as precise and unshowy as anything Barnett has recorded. This is one of the best songs of 2026.
Elsewhere, the album's pleasures are subtler. 'Stay in Your Lane,' the lead single released in 2025, remains an excellent piece of midtempo pop-rock, the kind of song Barnett writes that sounds effortless and reveals craft only after you've heard it a dozen times. 'Mantis,' despite its threatening name, turns out to be a meditation on stillness. 'Wonder' is a lovely piece of rolling guitar work that might be the most purely enjoyable song on the record.
'Mostly Patient' and 'One Thing at a Time' feel like the album is marking time rather than advancing its ideas — Barnett occasionally says less than she could, and on Creature of Habit, the restraint sometimes reads as limitation rather than control. But 'Great Advice,' the penultimate track, recovers with some of Barnett's sharpest writing.
Creature of Habit is an album that doesn't announce itself. It rewards revisiting, it gives up its secrets slowly, and it's the work of a songwriter who has found a way to keep making music that sounds exactly like herself without sounding stale. Three albums in, that's not a small achievement. Grade: B+.