There are nine songs on Abigail Lapell‘s new full-length, Shadow Child, one for each month of pregnancy. The Toronto-based songwriter was carrying her first child when she travelled to Vancouver Island to record the album, so it is unsurprising the songs came to revolve around motherhood. But in something of a pivot away from the lush folk sound of 2024’s Anniversary, the tracks emerged stripped back and stark, a stylistic move at least in part dictated by Lapell’s difficult experiences with IVF and miscarriage that comes to paint the journey to parenthood in all of its too-often unspoken truth.
The result is conflicted, reflective, braided from the twin threads of love and loss. A style captured by the ambiguous image of the title itself. Shadow Child refers to ultrasound scanning, that picture of “a liminal person that doesn’t quite exist yet,” as Lapell puts it. “Their status is ontologically blurry.” But across the nine songs, Lapell places this existenial uncertainty into a wider context, drawing on everything from personal experience and medical jargon to maritime myth, and in doing so allows the full spectrum of experience that is pregnancy the space it deserves.
Featuring fellow Canadian songwriter Jill Barber, lead single ‘Hazel’ introduces this nuanced style. What label Outside Music describe as “part lullaby and part elegy” which soothes and mourns in equal measure, addressed to the existentially vague child, be they in the womb, the future or memory. The single comes complete with a video by Lapell herself, cut from old super 8 footage filmed as a teenager and unearthed in the present. “Shot at a melancholy yet hopeful time in my life,” she explains, “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.”
Watch the video by Abigail Lapell herself below:
Shadow Child will be released on the 8th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.
