Status/Non-Status - Big Changes
You’ve Changed Records
Released on March 6th, 2026
Two albums in, Status/Non-Status returns with their third full-length release with Big Changes. This latest record comes after half a decade since the collective formerly known as WHOOP-Szo took on the name Status/Non-Status, a project led by Anishinaabe musician and artist Adam Sturgeon for whom the band offers a space to unpack complex family history.
Sturgeon is an established staple of the Canadian music scene. Along with Zoon’s Daniel Monkman, Sturgeon made the roads around the Polaris Music Prize shortlist with their OMBIIGIZI album Sewn Back Together (2022). Much in the spirit of this latest album, Sturgeon’s work is largely oriented around community-building. Big Changes brings together a mix of 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 Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and Rachel McLean, Eric’s Trip member Julie Doiron, Sunnsetter’s Andrew MacLeod, and Steven Lourenco among others.
Big Changes kicks things off with “At All,” a track which is quite Pavement-esque in its slackish groove of distorted and layered guitars enveloping a reflective vocal performance by Sturgeon. Lyrically, there is a sense of being disillusioned by the rhythm of the mundane and the 9-to-5 grind, no longer feeling it at all. “Peace Bomb” picks up the energy from the 90’s indie-rock energy to a more melodic power pop sound, featuring dialogic vocals between Sturgeon and O’Neil which at times hit a tense bratty punk sound over the fuzziness of the guitars. This is shortly followed up by the titular track “Big Changes,” which had a darker approach with the low-cut radio vocals and meandering instrumentation in the intro. This all comes together to effect a creeping atmosphere to breach the subject matter of the crossfire between bureaucratic inaction and a community’s will to survive — what is really at the core of the album thematically.
As we move on to “Blown Again,” the album takes a tonal shift into a bright mix of electric guitars, acoustic guitars, keys, and synthesizers. At its choral highs, there is a beautiful stereo panning of vocals by Kevin Drew and Rachel McLean — the general arrangement and spatial mix makes that moment feel ethereal, especially when more harmonic variations on this chorus hit in the latter half of the track. In “Basket Weaving,” that soft demeanor carries forward through its dreaming instrumental and panned vocals which envelop a heavily filtered and crunched up spoken word track. This kind of confessional sound weaves along to that iconic 90’s sound that Status/Non-Status has cultivated along the way, especially as the energy ramps up to a cascading movements of melodic guitars and synths in the outro.
With these sonic vignettes, Status/Non-Status builds on a foundation of 90’s alt and grungy rock songs and twee-ish power pop affinities. Songs like “Arnold,” which takes up some of those more rawer and crisp grunge tones for an energetic rock song. Then in other songs we find sharper edges of the other song, as in the instance of the dreamy sound of Sturgeon’s collaboration with Julie Doiron in “Good Enough” or hopeful melodies from “Bones.” As the album comes to a wrap, the duo of tracks “Bitumen Eyes” and “Bitumen Eyes II” showcase that contrasting energy featured throughout the album leading up to closing “Tom Climate.” “Tom Climate” takes up a more reflective and hypnotic instrumental groove building up on the fading traces from “Bitumen Eyes II,” picking up from its melodic tones over to an involved atmosphere held together by the steady rhythm. The orchestration built along the track gives way to a crashing finale as all sounds come to a dissonant end.
Big Changes builds on the sound that Sturgeon has cultivated for Status/Non-Status throughout their debut as Status/Non-Status in Warrior Down (2019) and its sophomore follow up in Surely Travel (2022). With an incredible cast of collaborators, the album shapes up to be a defining experience of what Status/Non-Status is for me. This maturity in the band’s sound coheres well with the thematic angle of the album, sitting tightly between its atmospheric moments of disillusion and its more awe-inspiring peaks.
