Courtney Barnett makes lackadaisical-sounding music about being uptight. More often than not, her breezy, sung-talked tunes sweat the small stuff, carrying those underlying anxieties with a strolling gait, a cock-eyed grin and a two-guitar wig-out.

Avant Gardener, the song that introduced this extraordinary Melbourne artist outside the local scene in 2013, told the tale of Barnett going into anaphylactic shock while weeding. Naturally, she blamed herself for being bad at breathing. She worried about the hospital bill. The conclusion to this gem of a slacker-pop tune? She should have stayed in bed.

A recent single, City Looks Pretty, finds Barnett pulling off a similar trick. Her fine band motors along blithely, with just a few guitar effects dissociating in the background to alert you that all is not peachy. In the lyrics, a plaintive Barnett contemplates the ironic lot of the touring musician. “Friends treat you like a stranger and strangers treat you like their best friend,” she notes. “One day, maybe never, I’ll come around.” It’s a mark of Barnett’s skill that she makes this most cliched of themes not only fresh but somehow universal. We all have someone we’re neglecting, some sort of affective jet lag. In a similar vein, Need a Little Time is another grunge-pop classic whose buoyant tune drags some very well-reasoned, considerate misery along behind it.

It is no wonder Barnett has new best friends wherever she goes.

In the past five years, indie rock has gained an eminently relatable idol, just when the whole genre most needed one. Thanks to her nasal delivery and forensic eye, Barnett is worthy of the Bob Dylan comparisons that have come her way.

But this is a songwriter made for our times: despairing of affording organic vegetables, making the best of house-hunting somewhere depressing, trying to maintain optimism in a world going to pot. Barnett’s effortless melodies fit into a grand tradition; you can hear all the drawling overthinkers from Jonathan Richman through to the Breeders. Understandably, Breeders Kim and Kelley Deal guest on one track on her latest album: Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence, the song that supplies the lyric of the album’s title.

More recently, Barnett has been attempting to square touring and fame with committed relationships. She runs a record label, Milk!, with her partner, Jen Cloher, who is also a songwriter of great skill; Barnett plays guitar in Cloher’s touring band. The dedicated fan could do worse than listen to Tell Me How You Really Feel back-to-back with Cloher’s self-titled album of 2017, which deals with, among other things, love over distance, reading too much into the silence between texts, and professional envy: all the result of the past five years of the couple’s lives. A key lyric? Cloher’s Forgot Myself tells us how she really feels: “You’ve been gone so long you could have been dead.”

Like the silences between texts, it’s tempting to read all sorts of things into Barnett’s songs of romantic miscommunication, which dominate this candid, if downbeat, album. “Walkin’ on eggshells gets tiring,” sings Barnett, “pullin’ teeth, white knucklin’/’N I don’t wanna hurt your feelings/So I say nothing.” Hence the big push towards pulling no more punches on Tell Me How You Really Feel, a request-cum-command that deals with intimacy, but also with the internet, which is full of people telling people how they really feel, possibly to the detriment of humanity.

Thus far in Barnett’s output, there has been much reportage without too much heavy-handed judgment. Tell Me How You Really Feel peels off the thick gloves Barnett definitely wears for gardening. Forget organic vegetables; her songwriting has gulped down a few protein shakes with a side order of steroids. Where previously, her condemnations were more implied, she is now holding her house keys between her fingers like improvised weapons.

The song titles tell some of the story: I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch opens on a scree of feedback before going off into high grunge dudgeon. Allergic to her own cat, this gnarly musician can nonetheless coax mini-apocalypses out of her rhythm guitar. Not for nothing are Nirvana a recurring reference point, one that gains even more traction on Barnett’s second album proper. Her Nameless, Faceless – Tell Me’s key track – recalls the title of Endless, Nameless, the hidden song at the end of Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Once again, the sweetness of Barnett’s ramalama, the Pixies-ish guitar solo, the adorable backing vocals – all mask the song’s barbed intent. All those nameless, faceless internet trolls and stalky, rapey incels? Barnett is really sorry for whatever happened to them to make them so bitter. The chorus sums up where we are in 2018, quoting Margaret Atwood: “Men are scared that women will laugh at them. Women are scared that men will kill them.” (Atwood uses “afraid” but the sentiment is the same.)

If Barnett has gained in directness here, there has been a slight compensatory adjustment. If you had to boil it down, microtonally observed tragicomedy is her greatest strength. She has previously turned roadkill into art on 2015’s Dead Fox (“a possum Jackson Pollock is painted on the tar”) and has transformed the warning you see inscribed on the backs of trucks into an existential rallying cry: “If you can’t see me, I can’t see you.”

On Tell Me How You Really Feel, the vignettes are less visual, the detail is less granular, and the song fictions less developed. On 2015’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett’s Elevator Operator was a masterclass in short-story writing: the fed-up young guy, with his “soy-linseed-Vegemite crumbs”; the hard-faced businesswoman, and a misunderstanding about a suicide attempt.

By contrast, “no one’s born to hate”, as Hopefulessness, the album’s opening track points out. And, later: “Take your broken heart, turn it into art.” This time there is a little less of Barnett’s artfulness – necessarily, given the title. The minor downside on this emotionally muscular set is that there is a slight loss of art in compensation. But even without the set dressing, the supporting cast, or the kitchen-sink details, Barnett is still a songwriter to beat, processing difficult emotions, lunging at optimism.