Pressing Concerns: Status/Non-Status, Abi Reimold, Human Potential, Powerwasher

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Welcome to the Thursday Pressing Concerns, featuring three records coming out tomorrow, March 6th (new LPs from Status/Non-Status and Human Potential, and a new EP from Powerwasher), plus one that came out on Tuesday (an album from Abi Reimold). Check ’em out, and if you missed either of this week’s earlier blog posts (Monday: a Pressing Concerns featuring Heavenly, Royal Ottawa, Me, You, & My Metronome, and Michael Cormier-O’Leary; Tuesday: the February 2026 playlist), check those out, too.

If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what else we’ve written about lately. If you’d like to support Rosy Overdrive, you can share this (or another) post, or donate here.

Status/Non Status – Big Changes

Release date: March 6th
Record label: You’ve Changed
Genre: Fuzz rock, shoegaze, 90s indie rock, art rock, psychedelia, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Good Enough

Anishinaabe indie rocker Adam Sturgeon exploded onto the scene (well, my scene) in 2021 with an EP called 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years that introduced his Status / Non Status project (he’d previously made music as Whoop-Szo). Over the next three years, another Status / Non Status EP, an LP, and two albums from OMBIIGIZI (Sturgeon’s duo with Zoon’s Daniel Monkman) followed, and the chaotic, all-over-the-place energy of 1, 2, 3, 4, 500 Years began to congeal into a recognizable sound combining 90s indie and alt-rock, psychedelia, and folk. Big Changes is nonetheless the first Status / Non Status album since 2022, and Sturgeon takes the opportunity to make an overwhelming, emotional Canadian rock album. Of course, as per usual, Sturgeon shares the spotlight: contributors to Big Changes include members of Sunnsetter, Zoon, and Broken Social Scene, as well as Julie Doiron (anyone who’s heard Sturgeon’s music knows how much of an influence Doiron’s old band Eric’s Trip has been on it, so that feels significant).

Sturgeon has the gift of pulling together blunt alt-rock with the mistiness of dream pop, and “At All” opens Big Changes with a nice, fuzzy, vaguely unsettled summation of Status / Non Status’ core sound. Speaking of unsettling, “Peace Bomb” embodies the contradiction of its title, buzzing and whirring and sounding apocalyptic and catchy all at once. If Big Changes isn’t the most outwardly friendly Adam Sturgeon album, the moments of beauty are still there; “Basket Weaving” (featuring Colleen “Coco” Collins) is an obvious example, the six-minute Canadian rock hymn “Good Enough” (featuring Doiron) perhaps even more so. I would call “Good Enough” the album’s centerpiece if not for “Arnold”, an intense, uncomfortable song that is uplifting at times but without waving away the darker details. Big Changes’ finale, the six-minute post-rock monolith “Tom Climate”, is able to rival the record’s aforementioned emotional peaks without a word; it sounds like mountains moving. “Tom Climate” careens to a stop amidst feedback, electronic sputtering, and a pounding drumbeat; Big Changes are here, indeed, but Status / Non Status haven’t proclaimed a winning faction yet. (Bandcamp link)

Abi Reimold – Picking Stones

Release date: March 3rd
Record label: Self-released
Genre: Singer-songwriter, folk rock, slowcore, bedroom folk
Formats: Digital
Pull Track: Destiny

It’s been ten years since Abi Reimold released Wriggling, their first and, up until now, only album. Put out via Sad Cactus (Floral Print, Maxshh, Powerwasher), it was a dingy indie rock album from the basements of mid-2010s Philadelphia; Pitchfork’s Nina Corcoran compared them to Mitski and Angel Olsen at the time, believe it or not. Lurch forward a decade, and Reimold is back with a humble collection of eight songs called Picking Stones, reinventing themself as a dusty slacker folk/alt-country singer-songwriter. Though it was recorded with a full band (drummer Evan Campbell, pedal steel player Zena Key, bassist Bill Magerr, and Evan McGonagill, with whom Reimold has played in Hour, on cello), Picking Stones puts the spotlight entirely on Reimold’s writing. These intimate songs of infatuation, yearning, drinking, and smoking are, despite the vibe they give off, not shrinking violets themselves.

“Pining like an evergreen / On the curb your Christmas tree,” Reimold sings to open Picking Stones via its title track, a sparse acoustic one–the torch song is very nearly extinguished, but we can still see a little light. I can hear the classic country influence in the occasionally-rousing “Drinking Song” (“I don’t care if it’s twelve o’clock or it’s noon”, indeed), while the twee-folk turn of “Open to Suggestions” is content to lackadaisically sketch out a nice little life (“We’re good together, you and me and Mary Jane”), punctuated by the fifty-second coda of “Stoned” (“I wanna get stoned on you / You’re the highest that I ever fell”). Late-album highlights “Phasing” and “Destiny” present perhaps the most “complete” version of  2026 Abi Reimold’s sound, a mixture of the greyscale 2010s indie rock in which they came up, confounding, slowcore-ish turn-of-the-century singer-songwriters like Nina Nastasia, Hannah Marcus, and Jenny Mae, and just a touch of the orchestral work Reimold’s done in Hour (McGonagill’s cello is what really knocks “Destiny” out of the park for me). There’s a lot to like in Picking Stones if you get to know it, and I wouldn’t mind Reimold making another one of these in under ten years. (Bandcamp link)

Human Potential – Eel Sparkles

Release date: March 6th
Record label: What Delicate
Genre: Art rock, post-punk, psychedelia
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Art Beat

In the early 2000s, Andrew Becker was the drummer for cult Washington, D.C. trio Medications, playing on their first EP and LP (both released on Dischord) before departing. He resurfaced in the Brooklyn group Screens not long afterwards, but they broke up in 2011, and Becker has been helming a solo project called Human Potential ever since. Eel Sparkles is the seventh album from the musician and filmmaker (currently based in Los Angeles) under the Human Potential name, self-released on Becker’s own label What Delicate Recordings like the six albums before it. Not that I necessarily expected Becker’s current music to sound like a band he drummed for twenty years ago, but it’s notable just how far away Eel Sparkles is from Medications’ relatively minimal post-punk/post-hardcore; this is a polished, layered, slightly dreamy, slightly psychedelic indie rock record.

Opening track “Sun-E Corporation Teenage Anthem” is very nearly prog-pop, just as contorted as it is sunny, and “The House That Kept Hemingway Alive” does something similar with the added layer of brisk, fidgety percussion. Speaking of percussion, the drumbeat that anchors the five-minute “Art Beat” (lives up to its title, yes) goes a long way towards making that one’s relatively chaotic, boisterous energy one of Eel Sparkles’ clearest standouts. Human Potential rarely rock straightforwardly, but Eel Sparkles does rock–the folk-tinged “Practice Songs for the Unloved”, the incredibly wonky art punk of “The Sightseer”, and the constantly-in-motion “I Have Always Been Some Human” ensure that the album is arguably even more engaging in its back half. There’s a tension between these bursts of energy and the more suspended-animation moments on Eel Sparkles (like most of “Do You Remember Albert?” and “Street Sweeper’s Daughter”); this helps the album feel like the work of an artist intensely piecing together an overarching vision. (Bandcamp link)

Powerwasher – Pressure

Release date: March 6th
Record label: Strange View
Genre: Noise rock, post-punk, art punk, garage punk
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Parachute

Back in 2024, the Baltimore quartet Powerwasher put out their debut album, Everyone Laughs, which combined the garage-y post-punk of their 2020 EP The Power of Positive Washing with some noisier post-hardcore. Almost exactly two years after Everyone Laughs, Powerwasher are back with Pressure, an EP that condenses their whole deal into five songs and fifteen minutes. The band are still very much the explosive, fun, hardcore-ish punk rock group of their past work (you’ll hear bits of classic SST Records, Nomeansno, and, of course, Dischord here), but Powerwasher have taken this between-album release to get a little weird, too.

“Parachute” is a hard-charging, electric punk opener, but the no wave-y horns and strange whirring sounds hint at some of the odder undercurrents (and, occasionally, straight-up currents) on Pressure. “10,000 Cuts” is one of the most interesting things I’ve heard from Powerwasher yet, switching between aggressive hardcore-ish punk to more subtle, almost dreamy math rock around halfway through. The metallic egg punk of “Mirage” is simple enough until RXKNephew kamikazes in for the last minute or so (finally, the collaboration we’ve all been clamoring for!); Neph is (somewhat sadly) the only guest rapper to appear on Pressure, but the drilling post-punk of “3-meo-pce” and the avant-hammer “Haste” ensure the EP ends on a bang nonetheless. This noisy, busy dispatch from the world of Powerwasher should hold us until the four of them get another LP together. (Bandcamp link)

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