Award-winning Toronto singer-songwriter Abigail Lapell has announced her upcoming new album Shadow Child, an album about motherhood whose nine songs each represent a month of gestation, will be released May 8th via Outside Music. Lapell has also released the title track as the single, which features guest vocalist Frazey Ford and her already otherworldly vocals harmonising with a theremin. The song’s acoustic and baritone guitars underpin lyrics that explore the work of childbirth, both its joys and terrors – listen to it below.
The single arrives with a stop motion animation video that Lapell herself “made years ago, about a figure creating another figure out of clay,” she says. “It was shot in one ‘take’, all in camera, and filmed backwards – so that, when played in reverse, it shows the creature emerging from a formless blob. I recently found all my old Super 8 films, and I thought this odd little black and white claymation might fit well with ‘Shadow Child’, a song about pregnancy and childbirth – creation and transformation. But when I actually tried pairing the two, it was crazy. The unedited ‘backwards’ visuals fit the song exactly perfectly – like down to the second. Complete with the final reveal of the figure’s shadow, and then my own hands in silhouette, returning it to a formless blob. I couldn’t believe it. Even the unintended strobe effect from my camera’s ‘shutter ghosting’; it kind of reminds me of the flickering of an ultrasound. So this video feels like a really wild collaboration with my much younger self. And a celebration of the oddness of “creation”, in both senses – as an artist and, now, as a mother.”
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. 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.”
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). Lapell’s road to motherhood was fraught, involving years of IVF and a 2023 miscarriage — that she experienced on stage while on tour. (She finished her set.) Her son was born in November 2024. The song cycle covers joy and loss, using metaphors from Maritime tragedy, “little cannibals,” reproductive health, acquiring language, and lives altered by the arrival of a newborn. The title track refers to ultrasound imaging of “a liminal person that doesn’t quite exist yet,” says Lapell. “Their status is ontologically blurry.”
The album can be pre-ordered here.
Shadow Child Tracklist:
Whistle Song (One In A Million)
Hazel ft. Jill Barber
Shadow Child ft. Frazey Ford
Mockingbird ft. Dana Sipos
Talking To Myself
Little Cannibal
So Long ft. Pharis Romero
Mother Tongue
Sing A Rainbow
