There’s a strong sense on Courtney Barnett’s new album that a rebuilding process is complete, as if clapping her hands would cause a haze of drywall dust to cloud outward. Creature of Habit is her first music-and-lyrics album in a little more than four years. (The all-instrumental End of the Day arrived during the time in between.) In the interim, Barnett closed down Milk Records!, the label she co-founded with Jen Cloher when the two were still in a romantic relationship, and relocated from her native Australia to Los Angeles. The time is right for a freshly asserted artistic statement.

Things Take Time, Take Time, Barnett’s previous outing, was the probably the most tepidly received of her career. For the follow-up, Barnett brings back her bona fides as a crackling rock songwriter. There’s a recurring theme about accepting the familiarity of doing basic work well. Innovation isn’t necessarily required. On the spare “Sugar Plum,” Barnett sings, “It’s hard to break a habit/ When it’s just so comfortable.” The very title of the album’s first single, “Stay in Your Lane,” implies an adherence to the tried and true, and that’s an apt was to describe the track. Against a burbling rock sound, Barnett deploys a trademark weary wit: “Feel like a fish on a hook/ I’m crying like a child would/ And now I’m here, I might as well just go through with it.”

It’s to Barnett’s credit that the album is simultaneously dependable and fresh. “Mantis” is a prime example; it manages to be tightly controlled and loosely exploratory at the same time. Barnett might be “Always working from the same old pattern,” as she sings on the flinty “One Thing at a Time,” but she continually proves that similar patterns can come across very differently depending on the swatches that are used. Barnett sometimes achieves novelty through the enhanced vulnerability in her words and sometimes through the subtly offbeat layers of her music. She also draws on the inspiration of collaborators to give a slightly different spin to old pitches, as when Waxahatchee joins in on “Site Unseen.”

Creature of Habit closes with the easygoing “Another Beautiful Day.” On the cut, Barnett intones, “New skin, yeah, you bathe in the sunlight/ Close your eyes and say goodbye to those parasites/ Nobody blames ya, it’s in your nature/ You gotta put yourself first sometimes,” and it sounds like a sort of peace being achieved. After a fair amount of anxious wandering of previous records, maybe Barnett is finally settling into a person she’s comfortable being.