Today Status/Non-Status, dropped their album Big Changes via You’ve Changed Records.
As the title suggests, the record marks a bit of a departure from the band’s previously heavy, loud rock sound, leaning instead toward a more atmospheric approach.
Despite this shift in tone, the album still maintains the band’s signature intensity, delivering powerful songs that carry the same political weight and emotional depth fans have come to expect.
About the album by Adam:
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.”
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”, a collaboration with Odawa poet and artist Colleen “Coco” Collins, 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.”
Big Changes gets: 📷📷📷📷📷📷📷📷/10.
Status/Non-Status – Big Changes [Streaming]
