COURTNEY BARNETT Releases Tell Me How You Really Feel

Courtney Barnett today releases her highly anticipated and already acclaimed album Tell Me How You Really Feel.

Over the course of just a few years Barnett has become internationally renowned for her distinctive and acclaimed musical lexicon. Her debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit saw her top year-end lists and sell out shows to adoring audiences on five continents. She played the most iconic and revered festival stages, won the Australian Music Prize, J Award for Album Of the Year, APRA’s Songwriter Of the Year and four ARIA Awards. The album was even nominated for a Grammy and a BRIT Award. In the meantime she’s worked on music with the likes of Jack White, The Breeders and Jen Cloher as well as releasing last year’s masterful collaboration album with US songwriter Kurt Vile, Lotta Sea Lice. Even her label Milk! Records is revered worldwide.

So… how do you follow all that up?

In Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett has revealed an exhilarating shift and a bold step forward. From its title to the unsettling cover image – a blood-red tinted self-portrait in uncomfortably tight close up – Barnett reveals a new-found confidence and perspective. Whereas once she examined the world through the prism of self-analysis, Tell Me How You Really Feel shifts that focus to those she interacts with – the good ones, the bad ones, the loved ones. Those she knows intimately and those who are strangers.

There’s a muscularity to the instrumentation, a tenderness in her voice and a boldness to the lyrics. It speaks to Barnett entering a remarkable new phase of her musical evolution. Take storming first single ‘Nameless Faceless’ for instance, a punk rock anthem simmering with barely contained anger at women’s continued dehumanisation at the hands of a male dominant society and her own treatment at the hands of anonymous trolls. Similarly, the brutal ‘I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch’, where Barnett barks “Sit down and shut up/ it’s all the same/ you never change” and later, “I can only put up with so much shit” is the most eviscerating two minutes of her oeuvre to date.

Which is not to say that there aren’t moments of grace and introspection – on ‘Crippling  Self Doubt and A General Lack of Self Confidence’ she grapples with the responsibility of being an unexpected spokesperson of her generation, one whose every word is open to scrutiny and examination, somehow turning the chorus of “I don’t know/ I don’t know/ I don’t know anything” into something both humorous and peculiarly affecting. And on the gorgeous album closer ‘Sunday Roast’, she sings with great tenderness about the weekly meal she and her friends cook for each other in Melbourne. It is a stirring track – gentle and warm, filled with the sense that over the course of this record, we have moved from hopelessness to something quietly, softly optimistic. “Keep on keeping on, you know you’re not alone”, runs the refrain.

Last night Barnett returned to perform on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon for a fourth time. She’s currently in the middle of a series of sold out USA and European album-launch shows and will return home in August to play the largest Australia and New Zealand shows of her career. Full tour dates and ticketing below.

Purchase / Download / Stream Tell Me How You Really Feel via https://courtney-barnett.lnk.to/tmhyrfpr