Abigail Lapell Announces New LP Shadow Child and Shares First Single
ABIGAIL LAPELL’S NEW ALBUM, SHADOW CHILD, ARRIVES MOTHER’S DAY WEEKEND, MAY 8, 2026 VIA OUTSIDE MUSIC.
Every mother has a unique story. One thing is true for every mother, though: there’s no deadline quite like a pregnancy. Award-winning Toronto singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell was pregnant with her first child when she booked studio time on Vancouver Island to make an album about motherhood. The nine songs on ‘Shadow Child’, one for each month of gestation, had to be ready before then, and her return flight was booked on the last day she could safely fly in her third trimester.
press photo abigail lapell
Working with producer Colin Stewart (Dan Mangan, Black Mountain), Lapell finished her songs in the studio and on rural walks beside the Pacific Ocean. She enlisted some of her favourite singers, all British Columbians, all mothers: Frazey Ford, Jill Barber, Pharis Romero. “They’re all people with unique, distinctive voices,” she says, “which is what I’m drawn to.”
For Shadow Child, musically, Lapell was looking for a stark, acoustic sound, as opposed to 2024’s JUNO Award-nominated Anniversary (recorded in Niagara with Great Lake Swimmers’ Tony Dekker) and 2022’s acclaimed Stolen Time (recorded in Montreal with Howard Bilerman, featuring E Street Band saxophonist Jake Clemons).
Pre-save ‘shadow child’ here
The single arrives with a visualizer created by Lapell “using old super 8 footage I filmed as a teenager and recently rediscovered. Shot at a melancholy yet hopeful time in my life, the film features birds in flight and at rest, often shaky, scratchy or out of focus. I feel like this stuttering footage has its own fragile beauty that resonates with the song’s sweet message of a nascent love, half-formed but all-consuming.”
Today, Lapell is sharing the first single from the album, ‘Hazel’ featuring Jill Barber. Part lullaby and part elegy, ‘Hazel’ is a gentle love letter to an unborn or future child, or one that may never be. The song’s soft plucked electric guitar floats beneath sweet childhood imagery; sandcastles, snow angels, sunshowers, and a name carried off on the ocean breeze.
Listen to ‘hazel’ here.
coverart ‘shadow child’
