Abigail Lapell has announced Shadow Child, a new album arriving later this year (on May 8th, via Outside Music), alongside its first single “Hazel“ — a song that holds, in equal measure, the tenderness and grief of a love addressed to a child not yet certain to exist.
The Toronto singer-songwriter booked studio time on Vancouver Island while pregnant with her first child, working against a deadline as literal as it gets: her return flight was scheduled for the last day she could safely fly in her third trimester. The nine songs on Shadow Child mirror nine months of gestation, recorded with producer Colin Stewart (known for his work with Dan Mangan and Black Mountain) and finished, in part, on rural walks beside the Pacific Ocean. For her guest vocalists — Jill Barber, Frazey Ford, and Pharis Romero, all British Columbians and mothers — Lapell sought voices with genuine distinctiveness. “They’re all people with unique, distinctive voices,” she says. “Which is what I’m drawn to.”
“Hazel,” featuring Barber, is the album’s opening statement and one of its most quietly affecting pieces. Built on a soft, plucked electric guitar, the song drifts through an imagined childhood rendered in vivid, sensory flashes: castles in the sand, angels in the snow, hazelwood and amber on a warm summer breeze. Lapell addresses her subject directly — “Hazel would you wake, see the sun rise / Watch the day break through your open eyes” — conjuring a person into being through the sheer force of anticipation. It’s a technique as old as lullabies themselves, and just as potent. The song borrows freely from nursery tradition (“rings around her fingers, bells on her toes / she will have music wherever she goes”), but folds these familiar images into something more searching. “Tell me what you dreamed before you were born,” Lapell sings, and the question carries the full weight of the album’s central preoccupation: a love directed at someone whose existence remains, for now, uncertain.
That uncertainty is earned. Lapell’s road to motherhood involved years of IVF and a miscarriage in 2023 that she experienced on stage while on tour — she finished her set. Her son was born in November 2024. The song’s closing image — “the echo of your name on the sweet, sweet summer air” — lingers long after the song’s closing notes.
The track arrives with a visualizer Lapell assembled from Super 8 footage she shot 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,” she says. “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.”
Stream: https://ffm.to/al-hazel
Where her JUNO Award-nominated 2024 album Anniversary leaned into warmer production textures, Shadow Child strips back to something sparse and acoustic, its metaphors drawn from maritime tragedy, reproductive health, and the quiet seismic shift of a life altered by a newborn. The title track borrows from ultrasound imaging, referring to “a liminal person that doesn’t quite exist yet,” says Lapell. “Their status is ontologically blurry.” If “Hazel” is any indication, Shadow Child navigates this blurriness with exceptional grace.
Lapell tours in support of the album this spring.
Pre-Save Shadow Child: https://ffm.to/shadow-child
Live Dates
Tickets: https://abigaillapell.com/tour
Feb 26 – Niagara, ON – Niagara Artists Centre
April 10 – Saint John, NB – Imperial Theatre
May 8 – Richards Landing, ON – Algoma Trad
May 14 – Saratoga Springs, NY – Caffe Lena
May 15 – Exeter, NH – Word Barn
May 16 – Cambridge, MA – Club Passim
May 17 – New York, NY – Cafe Wha?
May 22 – Toronto, ON – Hugh’s Room
May 23 – Chelsea, ON – Motel Chelsea
May 24 – Ottawa, ON – Ottawa Tennis Club
More Dates To Be Announced Soon