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Introduction
A sign, any sign
There's something deeply honest about looking at a bug on your door and thinking: maybe that means something. That's the kind of person Courtney Barnett is in "Mantis," and honestly, that's the kind of person most of us are when we're going through it. This song isn't about a dramatic breakdown or a triumphant comeback. It's about the foggy middle ground, where you're functioning, kind of okay, maybe even fine, but still quietly scanning the world for proof that you're headed somewhere. The praying mantis on the door becomes the whole song's engine: a small, strange creature that makes you stop and ask what you're actually looking for. By the end, the question hasn't been fully answered. But that turns out to be the point.
Verse 1
Coming home to emptiness
The song opens with a return, physical or emotional, it's hard to say. Barnett has just gotten back somewhere and is immediately scanning the space for something, or someone, that isn't there.
"Just got back today and / I'm searching round the place / Looking for you-know-who / But there's no sign yet"
The vagueness of "you-know-who" is doing heavy lifting. It's not coy or cute, it feels like the name is too tender to say out loud, like speaking it would make the absence more real. Then Barnett pivots fast, almost defensively, into the rhythm of daily life.
"Singing, auto-pilot days / Shining, ultra-violet rays / On this dusty skeleton"
That image, sunlight hitting a dusty skeleton, is quietly devastating. It's not dramatic grief. It's the specific feeling of going through motions while something inside you hasn't quite caught up. The narrator is present in the physical world but operating on autopilot, a body in a room that used to mean something. Then comes that odd, reaching line about feeling "akin on a cosmic level," which is Barnett doing what she does best: using slightly absurd language to get at a genuine feeling of disconnection from the immediate and connection to something much larger and more abstract.
Pre-Chorus
Seeing through, letting go
Here the song turns inward and gets sharper. There's a sudden clarity that cuts through the fog of the first verse.
"I can see right through ya / Yeah I can read your bones / Just like a telephone book"
This could be about another person, that unnamed someone from the opening, but it reads just as powerfully as self-directed. Barnett seems to be stripping away illusions, about a relationship, about a version of herself, about whatever she was searching for when she got home. The telephone book comparison is vintage Barnett: mundane, slightly retro, weirdly precise. Then the shift happens.
"Maybe I should, give it up, begin again / I am exercising how good it feels to be alit"
"Begin again" is a familiar idea, but "exercising how good it feels to be alit" is something stranger and more interesting. It's not triumphant. It's deliberate, practiced, like being alive and lit up is a skill she's working on rather than a state she's arrived at. "Everything is temporary" closes this section with something that sounds like consolation but lands closer to resignation. Not quite hope, but not despair either. The song is calibrating its emotional temperature here, and it stays in that careful in-between zone.
Chorus
The mantis as messenger
And here it is. The moment that gives the song its name and its emotional center.
"Ooh, praying mantis on my door / Looking for meaning or just any sign at all"
The praying mantis lands and suddenly all that restless searching, the scanning of the empty apartment, the seeing through bones, the deliberate practice of feeling alive, finds an object. It's a real insect on a real door, but Barnett treats it like a visitation. The lowering of the bar from "meaning" to "just any sign at all" is where this chorus gets you. That's not someone who's lost faith. That's someone who's been in the fog long enough to negotiate downward, to say: I'll take anything, I just need something to point at.
"Organising all my thoughts, making them / Rhyme, choosing wisely where I spend my time"
The second half of the chorus is about the work of reorientation. Organizing thoughts, making them rhyme, choosing where to put your energy. These are small, practical acts. But after the cosmic longing of the first half, they feel grounding rather than small. The mantis made her stop. Now she's making decisions. That's movement.
Verse 2
Floating with feet planted
The second verse is where the song's central contradiction comes fully into focus.
"Gimme midnight love again / Feeling somewhat alien / I'm floating aimless / But got my feet concreted"
Floating aimless but feet concreted. That's the whole song in one image. Barnett isn't lost, exactly. She's rooted somewhere, by habit, by routine, by the sheer inertia of being a person with a life. But something in her is still adrift. "Midnight love" suggests a longing for depth, for connection that goes beyond the surface of ordinary days. "Feeling somewhat alien" is that cosmic disconnection again from the first verse, but here it's more personal and more lonely.
"Teach me the magic of an extra ordinary day / Anodyne the time away"
"Extraordinary" split into two words is a Barnett move worth noticing. It's literally an extra ordinary day, a day that's just a little more than ordinary, not a miracle, not a revelation. That's all she's asking for. Then "anodyne the time away" is striking because anodyne means something that soothes without curing, that dulls the pain without fixing it. She's not pretending she's healed. She's just getting through. The verse ends with a search for a perfect melody she knows doesn't exist, looking for it every morning in the trees anyway. That's the mantis impulse again: knowing the sign you're looking for might not be there, looking anyway.
Bridge
Good enough to keep going
The bridge strips everything back to its most essential statement, and it's more powerful for how unpolished it sounds.
"I got my head sorted sort of, I keep / Going, just because yeah just because"
"Sorted sort of" is one of the most quietly funny and painfully real phrases Barnett has ever written. Not sorted. Not a mess. Sort of sorted. The repetition of "just because yeah just because" refuses to dress up the motivation. There's no inspiring reason to keep going. There's just the going. This is the song finally arriving at its honest bottom line: survival without a grand narrative, continuation without clarity. And somehow, after everything that came before, that feels like enough.
Conclusion
The mantis was always you
"Mantis" begins with a return and a search, and it ends without having found what it was looking for. The unnamed someone never shows up. The perfect melody stays hidden in the trees. The meaning behind the mantis on the door remains unresolved. But here's what Barnett actually pulls off: she makes that non-resolution feel like the point. The praying mantis doesn't deliver a message. It just stops you. It makes you look. And in that moment of looking, you start organizing your thoughts, choosing where to spend your time, taking stock of how your feet are planted even while your head floats. The song is a portrait of someone learning to live inside the question rather than waiting for the answer. "I got my head sorted sort of" isn't a failure. It's a form of grace. If you've ever stood in the fog of your own life and thought: I don't know why I'm doing this but I'm doing it, this song sees you. That's what the mantis is for.
