It’s morning in Joshua Tree, and Courtney Barnett is having tea. It’s also the release day of her latest album, End of the Day. The body of work is a standout from all her previous projects – it’s an album composed of only instrumental tracks that she recorded as the score for Anonymous Club, Danny Cohen’s documentary film on her life and art. For a musician famed for her lyrical wit, a fully-instrumental album certainly marks a step outside the box.

But Barnett is unphased. If anything, she’s at a point in her career where she’s able to just sit back and enjoy it. “Every time I release something, the day before I’m running around and stressing out,” she tells me. “But I just feel really proud of (the album), and happy to release it. It feels really good.”

End of the Day wasn’t initially meant for an album release, nor were the songs meant to live outside of Anonymous Club at all – they’ve been sitting in Barnett’s archive since 2021. “It certainly crossed my mind that it wasn’t a typical release,” she explains. “And then I just kind of thought, ‘Well, I really love it. And I’m really proud of it. And I love listening to it.’”

Her newest album is also the final release from Milk! Records, the Melbourne-based DIY label she founded at the age of 24 that has since become an indie staple. “It’s been a real consistent and important part of my life, but it just seemed to be the right time to move on,” Barnett says. “It’s been emotional, but I know it’s the right decision. So far, it’s been nice looking back and reminiscing on the amazing memories and what an incredible community of people and artists Milk! Records has accumulated over the years.”

Really, though, the latest record is one that’s fundamentally born from relishing in the journey over the finished product. When Cohen was ready to present the final cut of his film to Barnett, the pair holed up in a Melbourne studio for two days where Barnett, along with her frequent collaborator Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint, and improvised a soundtrack straight to the film.

“We went in and didn’t spend too long discussing a direction or a sound or any influences,” she recalls. “I think neither of us really wanted to. We didn’t want to set any parameters or be influenced too much by anything in the moment.” Working in this way — allowing herself to follow any whim, and to feel rather than intellectualise — was liberating for Barnett. While she’d explored this kind of free-range experimentation in the comfort of her own home, working this way in front of collaborators proved a whole new experience. “With other ears suddenly around, I felt really intimidated,” she confesses, “but I think that’s why I’m so proud of the album. The freedom of it is really special.”

That’s not to say Barnett doesn’t have strong influences. “Obviously, all these things creep in there. And, you know, the whole musical landscape patchwork quilt of my life is sitting there being funnelled into this new music.” And it’s these very influences that we spend the remainder of our time discussing. The Nine Songs that, she believes, were in some way instrumental to the creation of End of the Day.

As is the case with most music lovers, whittling down her selections proved tricky. “I went on this full journey of making a playlist of the most important songs of my life, with the first songs I can remember as a child,” she says. “I didn’t know how to trim it down! So I had to set myself this parameter of, you know, songs that I was listening to in the last few years that tied in with my new album.”

Many of the tracks, as you might then expect, are instrumental and experimental. But, like End of the Day itself, the most significant thread that ties these works together is a feeling that they’re all able to capture. They’re emotive rather than cerebral, meant to make us pause rather than to stimulate us, and they too place process over product.

In her Nine Songs, like on her new album, Barnett gives us a preview of the creative mind at its most essential, its most vulnerable, and its most pure.