OMBIIGIZI Release New LP, Share “Street Names and Land Claims” Single | ‘SHAME’ LP Out Today via Arts & Crafts
Today, OMBIIGIZI, the Anishinaabe-Canadian band led by Daniel Monkman (aka Zoon) and Adam Sturgeon (aka Status/Non-Status), are releasing their sophomore album, SHAME.
OMBIIGIZI embarks on a starkly honest, yet richly uplifting journey on their new album. “Shame is a thing we all share,” the band says of the album’s title and core theme. “While the last album [2022’s debut Sewn Back Together] focused a lot on the positive force of healing despite odds, SHAME let’s things slide – it shares the things we don’t always say, it calls to others to heal and reminds them it’s OK – to feel, to be angry or sad, and that the world we experience can set the drag on high. But always it calls you in and forward.”
Alongside the release of SHAME, they are highlighting the track “Street Names and Land Claims.” ‘We are the effect and our shame is hard to define,’ OMBIIGIZI sings over the sounds of their towering guitars constructed on ancient syncopated rhythms, the band’s quintessential blend of modern and traditional elements. Charged by its themes of Indigenous land rights and colonization, the poetry and distortion of Adam Sturgeon unites with the vast soundscapes of Daniel Monkman, as OMBIIGIZI ride the razor’s edge of society’s confrontation with Mother Nature.
“Street Names and Land Claims” was another song where it was really fun to push ourselves into territories of interesting timing, rhythm, and adding a bit more grit to the table,” remarks Sturgeon. “The lyrics are totally abstract and confused just like the spiritually broke language of English. And we really played on that theme a lot with juxtapositions and the silly things that people put in their pockets to inform themselves that they’re living in the right way, and that everything is a contradiction.
“We need to drive to the environmental protest. We have to spend eight million dollars on the echo-chic pants. Our lattes cost $12 and we’re not giving the change to the people sitting outside the coffee shop,” he continues. “So “Street Names and Land Claims,” even the song title is very time-appropriate as we tear down statues.”
Through its irrepressible storytelling and captivating sonics, again recorded with Nyles Spencer with Drew at The Tragically Hip’s Bathouse Studio in Kingston, Ontario – promising better tone, wider strident-to-bliss dynamics, more of what this collusion of creative souls does best – OMBIIGIZI (pronounced om-BEE-ga-ZAY, meaning this is noisy) conjure a future from the remnants of the stolen past.
“Ultimately, the main point of the songs is that within each of us is an ability to love oneself and to heal.”
OMBIIGIZI‘s sophomore album, SHAME, is out today via Arts & Crafts.
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