WATCH / SHARE “BASKET WEAVING” HERE
STATUS/NON-STATUS NEW ALBUM, BIG CHANGES, OUT NOW
VIA YOU’VE CHANGED RECORDS
BUY / STREAM BIG CHANGES HERE
“Hope and hopelessness teeter side by side, big drums and jingle dresses ring out beneath driving guitars, and questions about land, belonging, and survival linger long after the last lyric fades.” - Atwood Magazine
“In a moment defined by fragmentation, Status/Non-Status offers something sturdier: music as community, and community as survival.” - RANGE Magazine, Frequency Forecast 2026
“Adam Sturgeon and co. are back with an album centred on family. …a record that’s raw and urgent.” - CBC Music, Albums We Can’t Wait To Hear in 2026
“We have the utmost faith in Anishihaabe songwriter Adam Sturgeon and co. to mine the trials and tribulations of navigating life's Big Changes” - Exclaim!, 2026 Anticipated Albums
Photo Credit: Natasha Roberts // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Earlier this year, Status/Non-Status released their new album, Big Changes, a record about survival, but also about making connections in order to endure. Led by Anishinaabe musician and artist Adam Sturgeon, the record is the big noise we make together when the world feels like it’s falling apart, and the harmony that comes when we keep time with one another. At its core, Big Changes is an act of community-building. Though its songs focus on reckoning, reflection, and resistance, the album derives its strength from the people who contributed to its creation.
Today, the band shares the new video for "Basket Weaving", a song from Big Changes that is a collaborative piece with Odawa poet and artist Colleen (Coco) Collins. “Together we explore the ancestral experience of reconnection,” the band says. “In this instance, to a specific teaching and blood memory; that of the traditional basket weaving process - imagining ourselves on the river bed watching our Ancestors wade into the river to select the right piece of Ash to weave. Here, we question how far we have come as a society and look back in yearning and learning - as we also re-imagine our people gliding through history in Wiigwaas Jimnaan - (Anishinaabe word for Birchbark Canoe).”
WATCH / SHARE “BASKET WEAVING” HERE
BUY / STREAM BIG CHANGES HERE
MORE ABOUT BIG CHANGES (by Jim Di Gioia)
Over the years, Adam Sturgeon has undergone a metamorphosis, shedding old monikers and reclaiming heritage. In 2021, the collective formerly known as WHOOP-Szo became Status/Non-Status as part of Sturgeon’s ongoing exploration of the complex roots of his family history. Together with Zoon’s Daniel Monkman (who makes a guest appearance on Big Changes), Sturgeon introduced the world to OMBIIGIZI in 2022 via their Polaris Music Prize shortlisted record Sewn Back Together. Regardless of which project Sturgeon is working on, though, the one thing that doesn’t change is how he treats it: like family, protecting it at all costs. Every reinvention, every reckoning, every return leads back to the same role: provider, protector, father.
Alongside Sturgeon, there is a host of both long-time and new collaborators and friends—like Eric Lourenco, Jessica O’Neil, and Kirsten Kurvink Palm—as well as an extended circle of artists (including Steven Lourenco and Sunnsetter’s Andrew MacLeod) expanding Status/Non-Status into an every growing collective of artists that embodies the push and pull that animates the album itself: the tension between consistency and change and living in solitude and solidarity.
Big Changes comes from living through what Sturgeon describes as “a war on people and their ways of being” while engaging in the everyday domesticity of dropping the kids off at daycare, heading into work, doing chores around the house, and figuring out how to survive “what is beginning to feel like a real apocalypse.” Inspired by his in-the-moment work with OMBIIGIZI, and with over 40 rough song ideas on hand, Sturgeon recruited Dean Nelson (Beck, Thurston Moore, Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks) and Matthew Wiewel (of Deadpan Studios and engineer of Status/Non-Status’ previous album, Surely Travel) to build a home studio in the old church he lives in with his family in London, Ontario. Everything on Big Changes “Is centralized around our Monday morning recording sessions,” he says, “and this routine of caring for my young family in a disintegrating and tough city.”
WATCH / SHARE “AT ALL” HERE
For Sturgeon, Big Changes also reflects his lifelong dialogue with duality, a dichotomy “...felt through the contrast of being a mixed person,” who sees “racism perpetuated against people more visible than myself, while also not feeling like I’m Indian enough.” The record tussles with that uneasy and impossible balance of simultaneously walking in two worlds with conflicting values. It’s less a statement of intent than a lived reflection, one that acknowledges tension without resolving it. “I don’t feel conflicted about where I stand, but I’m not sure I’m always seen,” Sturgeon says, adding that, “[on Sewn Back Together, OMBIIGIZI] found balance in the dichotomy of being damaged and using it as a tool to move forward. Big Changes, however, is foreboding and inquisitive about what is to come.”
The song “Big Changes” brings these big ideas and concepts down to street level, reflecting the daily realities of life just outside Sturgeon’s own front door. “This song is about my hood, where I live and raise my family and what I see when I walk out the door,” he says, describing a neighbourhood “mired by gaps in the system” and burdened by housing crises, addiction, and lateral violence. Caught in the crossfire between bureaucratic inaction and a community’s will to survive, “Big Changes” expresses how people are forced into change simply to keep going, whether that change leads somewhere better or somewhere harder doesn’t really matter. What matters is endurance, adaptation, and the resilience to find ways to live with what’s left.
Despite its title, one thing that Big Changes doesn’t mess with is the music. Status/Non-Status hold fast to their intuitive and fluid style, their musicianship grounded in connection, familiarity, and an overarching trust in the power of their glorious noise. If anything, Status/Non-Status is more refined on Big Changes, summoning a sound that’s deliberate while retaining the untamed energy that first inspired them. Crunching guitars clock the daily grind of the nine-to-five on opening track “At All”, while bursts of ’90s indie-rock energy collide with sugar-coated power pop melodies on “Peace Bomb”. Ominous shades of gothic blues hang in the air on the title track, while the yin and yang of male and female harmonies (supplied by Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and Rachel McLean) on “Blown Again” temper abrasion with warmth. On “Basket Weaving”, contemplative acoustics and ambient synth textures intertwine with anthemic rock flourishes in an exploration of “ancestral experience of reconnection.” The influence of Canadian noise-rock pioneers Eric’s Trip runs like an undercurrent through Big Changes, especially in its community-minded spirit. That lineage comes full circle on the delicate lullaby ballad “Good Enough”, featuring Eric’s Trip Julie Doiron. “Working with Julie Doiron, my teenage hero and favourite bass player,” says Sturgeon, “is something I could only ever dream of. I don’t take accomplishing my dreams for granted,” he adds. “I am just so lucky Julie is such a giving and wonderful community member.”
Read the full album bio by Jim Di Gioia at https://www.killbeatmusic.com/statusnonstatus
PERFORMANCE DATES
May 13-16 - Great Escape - Brighton, UK
