Tell Me How You Really Feel

Courtney Barnett trades the wordy shrug of her early work for a harder, more direct account of anger, self-doubt, and the low hum of being a woman who reads the internet's death threats.

"Nameless, Faceless" quotes a real online troll and then answers it with Margaret Atwood's line about men fearing women will laugh at them while women fear men will kill them — a fuzz-rock chorus built around a fact of walking home at night. Barnett's guitar is heavier here, less rambling, and her deadpan cracks open into something rawer on "Need A Little Time" and the plainly-titled "Crippling Self-Doubt And A General Lack of Confidence." What could read as diary entries lands as argument, because she refuses the tidy resolution her tunes seem to promise. The record's honesty is its edge: she tells you how she really feels and lets it stay unresolved.