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It was a big weekend in Melbourne for pop-up rock shows. After Amyl and the Sniffers’ last-minute cancellation at Federation Square disappointed thousands on Friday night, another hometown hero brought a surprise explosion of joy to 200 fans with a free gig at the Punters Club on Sunday.
Courtney Barnett teased her ‘secret’ reappearance, the night after she took to the stage in Hobart for triple j’s 50th anniversary, via Instagram, the best part of two years since her last shows in Australia. As the rain bucketed down early Sunday evening, the damp but cheerful queue trailed hundreds of metres down Brunswick Street.
Courtney Barnett performs at the Punters Club in Fitzroy on Sunday night.Credit: Rick Clifford
“I’ve been mostly between LA and Joshua Tree and Melbourne, finishing writing and recording an album,” she explained earlier in the day. Stay in Your Lane, the single she performed on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show three weeks ago, was one of the album’s later additions.
“I was struggling a lot with lyrics, so started that song as a kind of a songwriting exercise, to get out of my own head, and that’s just what came up. It’s straight from the back of my head to the page.
“I feel like I was digging into my subconscious a bit more,” she said of the album Creature of Habit, due in March, “allowing space for some unknown elements … I was focusing a lot more on guitar.”
Barnett’s previous release, End of the Day, was an instrumental album that quietly bookended the first rush of her ascent, as if to reset energy levels and expectations after a spectacular rise from the inner north of Melbourne to the top of the global pops 10 years ago.
Barnett in full flight at the show. Credit: Rick Clifford
Her last album of songs, Things Take Time, Take Time, had been written during COVID: “More piano, keyboards, acoustic guitars, quieter and cosier. I think this album is a bit louder and freer,” she said.
After a raucous opening of City Looks Pretty, the fortunate few who made it inside the steaming venue on Sunday were among the first to hear Site Unseen and Mantis, songs of varying tempo and intensity mining the familiar, insightful inner monologues that make Barnett’s work so relatable.
Despite her famously slow and careful process, the through line remains the illusion of unedited thought in her songs. The hesitation, the self-effacing humour and brutal self-talk most of us keep in our heads becomes oddly communal: our own cloudy and tentative logic reflected back, with better guitar playing.
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Some are proper classics. Packed shoulder-to-chin in a room that could reasonably be described as heaving, we jostled in a slippery mass to the Nirvana-esque riff and roar of Pedestrian at Best and sang every tortuous syllable of Avant Gardener like the world was our hairbrush.
Barnett’s Punters Club arrival carried its own quiet symbolism. When she first moved to Melbourne in her early 20s the venue existed mostly as folklore, “the place everyone was reminiscing about; all these classic shows”. Sunday night was, improbably, her first time on the hallowed stage.
For inner-city fans who had followed her since her first EPs on her now-defunct indie label Milk Records, the intimacy of the gig felt like a full-circle moment: a return from the stratosphere of international stardom to a room barely large enough to contain our love.
And the joy was mutual. “This has been very nice, thank you,” she told us, grinning with relief, it seemed, that we were all still here and hanging on every shrewdly crafted word. “It’s good to see all your faces. And hear all your voices.”
The show peaked with a thrashing finale of I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch and Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party, before a solo encore of one last new song, the introspective Mostly Patient: “What’s inside that cloudy little head?” goes the dreamy opening line.
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Backed by drummer Stella Mozgawa and various bass players, Barnett has been introducing the new album in a series of similarly intimate shows across the USA in recent months, including a couple of nights at the late Levon Helm’s studio in Woodstock.
“It feels like another chapter, for sure,” she said before the show. “That’s scary but also exciting. A lot of the album is about change and stepping into new chapters. There’s a lot of grief in letting go of things and accepting the way things change, but also trying to learn gratitude at the same time. Taking all the lessons learned and seeing what happens next.”
Courtney Barnett isn’t expected to perform in Australia again until late in 2026. Creature of Habit, her first album in a new deal with Fiction Records, is out in March.
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