The Australian musician Courtney Barnett often sings about anxiety and depression. One track on “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” her new album, is titled “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence.” But those conditions rarely manifest themselves in predictable ways. Dread can yield frantic, needling work: deranged guitar, a yelping vocal. Yet Barnett’s most defining characteristic is her nonchalance. She sounds gloriously, enviably unbothered, even as the circumstances around her openly deteriorate.

In 2013, Barnett released a twelve-track compilation, “The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas.” “Avant Gardener,” a single from the collection, became a minor hit. It’s a wordy and ambling jam about navigating a domestic drama—specifically, going into anaphylactic shock while weeding a flower bed—in which Barnett drolly assesses the inanities and the ecstasies of life on earth. Even as her throat swells shut, she remains hungry for detail: “I’m breathing but I’m wheezing, feel like I’m emphysem-ing / My throat feels like a funnel filled with Weet-Bix and kerosene,” she sings in a low, calm voice.

The song’s opening lines (“I sleep in late / Another day / Oh what a wonder / Oh what a waste”) are a fairly neat summation of Barnett’s world view. She is preceded in her lyrical practice by songwriters like Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Liz Phair, and Craig Finn, of the Hold Steady—artists who find clever and effective ways to turn arcane impressions into narrative fodder, thus revealing the strange poignancy in minutiae. A keen but ordinary observation can be powerful, especially when it addresses a vague sense of ennui. Heartbreak looks different for everyone. Boredom is universal.

Barnett released her first full-length album, “Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit,” in 2015, on Milk! Records, her own label. (She was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist the following year, though she lost, regrettably, to the retro-pop singer Meghan Trainor.) Barnett, who recently turned thirty, recorded “Tell Me How You Really Feel” at a studio that is a thirty-minute walk from her home, in Melbourne. She’s never been very interested in fussiness, and the new album has an easy garage-rock feel. Barnett’s lyrics recall the talky folksingers of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, but she has a punk-rock heart, and on occasion a loose melody gives way to squall. When I watched her and her band at a few concerts during an American tour, in late 2014, a couple of months before the release of “Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit,” their performances reminded me of Nirvana: scrappy, liberated, thrilling.

Barnett’s narrative sensibility is wry, but, unlike so many of her indie-rock forebears, she isn’t out to antagonize her listeners. Her work lacks the cynicism of more sardonic writers, like Stephen Malkmus or Frank Black. Instead, she’s witty and confiding. It often feels as if she’s leaning over, conspiratorially, and whispering something just to you: “Dude, can you believe how ridiculous it is to be alive?”

“Tell Me How You Really Feel” is less specific and quotidian than Barnett’s previous albums; this time, she’s turned her observational jones inward, attempting to make sense of her mental landscapes. It’s a kind of soul-searching that comes from spending many hours gazing blankly out of plane or bus windows. “City Looks Pretty” feels like a letter to herself:

Everyone’s waiting when you get back home

They don’t know where you been, why you gone so long

Friends treat you like a stranger and

Strangers treat you like their best friend, oh well

This kind of shift happens often to successful musicians. A regular life is supplanted by a rarefied one, in which the routines of daily existence are given over to things like appearing on late-night talk shows, chatting with journalists, and playing enormous outdoor festivals. When your life becomes unrecognizable, a funny distance seeps in. On “Depreston,” a song from “Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit” (it recounts a bout of house-hunting with her longtime partner, the musician Jen Cloher), Barnett sang about the spiritual and practical perils of being on the front lines of gentrification:

We don’t have to be around all these coffee shops

Now we’ve got that percolator

Never made a latte greater

I’m saving twenty-three dollars a week

The verse works because it’s sharply observed and acutely familiar. It evokes all the preposterous mathematics—what can I live with, and what can I live without?—we engage in while trying to build comfortable lives. Barnett’s success has, in some ways, cost her that vantage point. Now she sings more frequently about her own dissociation from a more anchored existence. In a lesser writer’s hands, this change would be disappointing, even alienating, but Barnett makes the exhaustion of life on the road feel relatable. “I spend a lotta my time doin’ a whole lotta nothing,” she offers.

“Tell Me How You Really Feel” addresses both personal concerns and the broader Zeitgeist. At the end of 2017, Barnett was one of several hundred musicians who signed a frank open letter decrying sexism in the Australian music industry, and two new songs directly address systemic misogyny. “Nameless, Faceless” quotes Margaret Atwood: “Men are scared that women will laugh at them; women are scared that men will kill them.” At the end of the chorus, Barnett’s voice rises just slightly, as she hollers, “I hold my keys between my fingers!” Any woman who has ever had to speed walk down a side street late at night knows this trick—using your keys to make a kind of wolverine paw of your hand—but hearing it bellowed aloud, in a song about the suffocations of patriarchy, makes it clear just how insane a solution it is. Barnett tends toward lines that can be read in earnest or with ironic detachment—even the album’s title allows for some ambiguity of intention—and I still can’t figure out whether the bit about the keys is a joke (it seems unlikely that this technique has ever actually saved anybody), some sisterly advice, or both. The simplicity of her desire (“I wanna walk through the park in the dark”) becomes trenchant when, immediately, she points out its apparent impossibility.

Barnett likes to defuse things—“I don’t know, I don’t know anything,” she sings on “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence”—and, in the animated video for “Nameless, Faceless,” she finds a way to make the absurdity of the female predicament laughable. The director Lucy Dyson gives ordinary bushes menacing eyes (they also quake with rage), and, eventually, Barnett waves her arms around while hot dogs (no buns) drift limply across the screen, a winking stand-in for maleness. But on “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch,” Barnett sounds genuinely furious. Usually, when she sings, she edges away from stylization—her phrasing and tone feel instinctive, conversational. Here you can hear her carefully gathering herself, harnessing her fury and directing it with purpose: “I try my best to be patient, but I can only put up with so much shit,” she screams, dissolving into an angry rasp. The way she delivers the line reminds me of the riot-grrrl singers of the early nineteen-nineties.

“Tell Me How You Really Feel” opens with “Hopefulessness,” which is as good a word as I can think of to describe the tumult of the past couple of years and what it feels like to keep insisting on optimism (or pretending to insist on optimism) even when you feel like getting back into bed and pulling the covers over your head. Right away, Barnett delivers an important reminder: “You know what they say / No one’s born to hate.” She has somehow found a way to cling to her empathy, even as everything else changes. ♦