Shadow Child is the sixth studio album by Toronto singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Abigail Lapell, released on May 8, 2026 through Outside Music — timed to arrive just before Mother's Day weekend. The album is a deeply personal song cycle built around one of the most fraught and ultimately triumphant chapters of Lapell's life: her long road to motherhood, which involved years of IVF treatment and, in 2023, a miscarriage she experienced mid-performance while on tour — she finished her set. Her son was born in November 2024, and the nine songs on Shadow Child each represent one month of gestation, a structural conceit that gives the album an elegant, almost novelistic unity. Lapell booked studio time on Vancouver Island with producer Colin Stewart (Dan Mangan, Black Mountain) while still pregnant, and her return flight home to Ontario was scheduled for the last day she could safely fly in her third trimester — an unnegotiable deadline that gave the sessions a particular urgency and focus. As Rough Trade notes, she finished some songs in the studio and others on rural walks beside the Pacific Ocean.The album's nine tracks, running just over 32 minutes, have the compressed intimacy of a slim volume of poetry. Lapell plays guitars, piano, keyboards, accordion, and harmonica throughout, and the production is noticeably more sparse and acoustic than her JUNO Award-nominated 2024 album Anniversary — closer in spirit to 2022's Stolen Time. Four tracks feature guest vocalists, all British Columbian women and all mothers: Jill Barber appears on "Hazel," Frazey Ford lends her voice to the title track, Dana Sipos features on "Mockingbird," and Pharis Romero appears on "So Long." Thematically, the record moves through the full emotional landscape of the experience — the title track concerns ultrasound imaging of "a liminal person that doesn't quite exist yet"; "Little Cannibal" and "Mother Tongue" explore the physical and linguistic dimensions of new parenthood; and the album closes with a tender cover of Arthur Hamilton's children's classic "Sing a Rainbow." Silent Radio called it Lapell's strongest album to date, and German Gaesteliste agreed, noting that Shadow Child is "not only her most personal and emotional work — surprisingly, it has also become her strongest musically."
