Courtney Barnett

With her plainspoken charm and forensically specific storytelling, Australian indie-rock raconteur Courtney Barnett makes each song feel like you’re sitting on a pub stool next to a charismatic barfly telling you every detail of their life in four minutes flat. Born in Sydney in 1987, Barnett possesses a preternatural gift for spinning mundane anecdotes into oddly profound narratives, as on her gloriously rambling 2013 debut single, “Avant Gardener,” a track that clearly descended from the Liz Phair/Pavement school of ‘90s slackitude. But Barnett’s 2015 full-length debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, wrapped her witty wordplay in Nirvana-styled shit-kickers, stormy Crazy Horse jams, and just enough Sheryl Crow-esque country-rock bonhomie to woo the daytime crowd on Ellen and score a Best New Artist Grammy nomination. Since that international breakthrough, Barnett has continued to mine the absurdities and indignities of daily existence. Whether she’s channeling her neuroses into raging invectives (2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel), intimate vignettes (2021’s Things Take Time, Take Time), or group-therapy sessions with fellow zen philosophers (the Kurt Vile collaboration Lotta Sea Lice), she’s retained her uncanny knack for deeply interior monologues about her life that nonetheless function as a mirror of your own.