I experience this all the time with Premiere – possibly even more so since the recent update.
It’s not necessarily predictable but when it happens in 1 spot, it’ll keep happening. I used to be bale to get rid of this with some of the solutions mentioned above – putting fades at the start of clips, converting the source audio from wav or mp3 to aiff, even mixing down/exporting the audio only as an aiff then re-importing and putting this new track on the timeline used to fix the issue. Now nothing seems to work.
Stumped & ticked off. I now spend as much time trying to get a clean export as I do editing – sometimes more 🙁