Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	88/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
The A.V. Club	A−
Chicago Tribune
Cuepoint	A
The Guardian
Los Angeles Times
NME	8/10
Pitchfork	8.6/10
Rolling Stone
Spin	9/10

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is the debut studio album by Australian indie rock musician Courtney Barnett, released on 20 March 2015 by Milk! Records (Australia and New Zealand), House Anxiety/Marathon Artists (UK, Europe) and Mom + Pop Music (US). The album received wide acclaim and was ranked as one of the best albums of 2015 by numerous publications.

After playing with various bands in Melbourne, Barnett used money that she had borrowed from her grandmother to start her own Milk Records label and released her first EP, I've Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris (2012). Following the release of her first EP, Barnett signed to Marathon Artists (via its imprint House Anxiety). In August 2013, Marathon Artists released The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas, a combined package of Barnett's first EP and her second EP, How To Carve A Carrot into a Rose. The Double EP brought Barnett international critical acclaim, with the lead single, "Avant Gardener", named 'Best New Track' by Pitchfork in 2013. How To Carve A Carrot was released on a limited run by Milk! Records as a standalone EP in October 2013. In 2014, Marathon Artists partnered with Mom + Pop Music for the US release of The Double EP.

Barnett had spent a year writing songs for her album but only showed them to her band a week before they were recorded in order to capture a "fresh" sound. The song "Pedestrian at Best" was written "at the last minute" and the recorded version was the first time that Barnett had sung the words out loud. The album was largely recorded across eight days in Melbourne during April 2014 but the release was delayed due to touring commitments. Barnett unveiled the album at the 2015 South by Southwest festival and then embarked on a world tour that began in Paris.

The title of the album was taken from a poster that hung in her grandma's bathroom. It is also used as part of the lyrics of the hidden/bonus song "Stair Androids & Valley Um..." (see Track Listing section, below).

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit received widespread acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, based on 35 reviews. In a review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it "invigorating", saying that it provided a "convincing argument that rock & roll doesn't need reinvention in order to revive itself." Mike Powell of Pitchfork awarded the album a 'Best New Music' accolade, saying that "Barnett has nothing to prove and she's proving it."DIY magazine's Jamie Milton called the record "exceptional" and said "make no mistake - this is a debut like few others." Eric R. Danton, reviewing the album for Paste magazine, said that Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit was "one of the most compulsively listenable albums to come out so far this year."Everett True wrote in The Guardian that the album improves upon each listen because "it's been a while since western rock music – let alone Melbourne's fiercely insular and often too-precious indie scene – has thrown up a songwriter and lyricist as intriguing, compelling and down-to-earth, yet surreal and morbidly funny, as Barnett." In Cuepoint, Robert Christgau said Barnett's music has a "drive and focus" it did not have before, complemented by her passionate singing and a lyrical style reminiscent of John Prine and Jens Lekman but still "herself": "Formally, her songs are confessional, only they describe her material life and conflicted feelings acutely rather than dreamily, so that the songs occur in and are inflected by a deftly rendered physical and social world."

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