DAYDREAM: Charlie Lim and the Art of Returning in Stillness
Charlie Lim trims the excess and lets feelings carry his third full-length album, DAYDREAM.
Words Bernadette Soriano
Photos courtesy of Mirrorball Asia and Rin Tachihara
April 05, 2026
Reinvention is often the language of return, each record made to signal a break, yet Charlie Lim opts out of the mold.
DAYDREAM, his third full-length album, is slated for release at the end of 2026—announced alongside its lead single, “Nobody’s Home,” which premieres on April 3 with a music video directed by longtime collaborator Jonathan Choo, offering a first glimpse into the album’s interior build: spare, unguarded, and attentive to detail.
For first-time listeners, Lim arrives already nested in Singapore’s contemporary pop scene, with TIME/SPACE (2015) and CHECK-HOOK (2018) having established his reach and reputation.
Across records, streams, and stages, the throughline has remained controlled, with each song seeming to know precisely what it is doing, and how much it is willing to say.
Lim has long worked within a vocabulary of intimacy: measured phrasing, emotional precision, a preference for suggestion over declaration, and on DAYDREAM, these instincts feel less asserted than settled into place.
The record does not reach outward for scale. It refines what is already there. As Lim himself puts it, “It’s a delicate equilibrium,” he reflects, of both love and art. “This album taught me that clarity often comes from taking things away and trusting silence, space, and vulnerability to do the heavy lifting.”
Eight tracks, by design, make for a modest canvas—one the album keeps to, favoring depth over reach; and as it moves through familiar ground—loss, regret, the slow work of understanding—it does so sans insistence on the point, allowing each song to find its own pace. There is room here to linger, and in that lingering, something screens into view: not resolution, exactly, but a clearer sense of where one stands.
Collaboration in this long listen reads one of extension, with voices and instruments: Tamzene, Chok Kerong, Ng Pei-Sian, entering without upsetting the balance. Even the production, shaped in part by sugi.wa (aka Will Goldsmith), with Aneirin Wee, Ian Lee (PK Records, nkei, Rhyu), and Kin Leonn, knows better than to gild the lily, returning to a slowed premise: save that feeling, if left well enough alone, can sustain its sonic weight.
There are also traces of movement beyond the studio. Lim’s recollections of Manila—of early shows, of improbable lineups, of working with Clara Benin—all of which point to an artist rapt to continuity.
“More than a decade ago, a friend helped me and my bassist organize a whole bunch of shows out of the kindness of his heart,” he recalls. “He somehow managed to get me to open for Side A at 19 East, which was pretty crazy, and I guess even crazier realizing in retrospect that Joey Benin, their bass player, is Clara’s dad.”
That connection would later come full circle. “‘Wine’, which I got to be part of, is still one of my favorite features to this day,” he adds, speaking to a collaboration that continues to resonate within his catalog.
His career, sustained between the inward drift of songwriting and the outward forcefields of national projects, from “We Are Singapore” to the larger stage, has a way of letting the two meet where it counts. Some trace of that bleeds into this stripped-back turn, where the quieter choices are allowed their own footing, and little else.
If anything, Manila does not present itself to him as a place to revisit so much as something to pick up where it left off. “It’s been such a long time, so I’m sure it’ll feel very different,” Lim says, though the impulse remains familiar, “I’d love to get to meet and jam with more artists and songwriters, and it’ll be great to see what’s been going on since the last.”
DAYDREAM draws from a state often dismissed as idle, yet given form and direction. It reveals itself gradually, until its shape becomes clear in time.
To keep up with what’s next—from new singles to the full album rollout—follow Charlie Lim on: facebook.com/charlielim | instagram.com/wherewascharlie | twitter.com/wherewascharlie | youtube.com/charlielimVEVO | charlielim.net | charlielim.bandcamp.com
