[Cover photo credit to John Clemente]

Stephanie Babirak has announced her sophomore album, Rotten Fruit, arriving June 12th, 2026. Alongside the news, she has introduces lead single, “Hey Cain,” out now.

A NYC-based harpist, singer-songwriter, and composer, Babirak moves between the Classical and contemporary worlds. She maintains an active career in the Classical sphere while simultaneously writing and releasing original Jazz and Art-Pop music.

Rotten Fruit expands Babirak’s recent indie songwriting work, placing the harp at the center of a contemporary Folk-Pop landscape. Blending the instrument with guitar, bass, drums, and synths, Babirak reimagines the harp’s Classical roots. The album was written in collaboration with longtime creative partner Peter Scoma.

The album is “a meditation on goodness, guilt, and the things we inherit—drawing from biblical imagery to explore disillusionment, love, estrangement, and what it means to be ‘bad.’”

Lead single “Hey Cain” opens the story and world of the album Borrowing from the story of Cain and Abel, the song explores loss as “the grief and disbelief that comes from letting go of someone who is willing to lose you.”

Babirak explains:

This song borrows the story of Cain and Abel to explore the difficulty of accepting a very specific kind of loss. It’s about the grief, sense of betrayal, and disbelief that comes from letting go of someone who is ok with losing you, and how strange it is to mourn someone who’s still alive… someone you still love very much. I was thinking a lot about the First Corinthians verse ‘Love is patient, love is kind’ when I wrote this song, and about how untrue that can be—love can be incredibly painful even when it’s real.

STEPHANIE BABIRAK LIVE:

4/25/26 – Marlboro MA – New England Folk Festival