Charlie Lim Finds Clarity in the Silence of DAYDREAM

On his third album, DAYDREAM, Charlie Lim does not attempt to make his sound even larger. After records where songwriting, electronic production and R&B expanded into increasingly layered arrangements, the Singaporean musician chooses subtraction.

Released on 26 August 2026, the eight-track album was written over three years between Singapore and the United Kingdom. Its songs do not turn every emotion into an answer. They remain close to uncertain relationships, regret and decisions whose meaning changes each time they are reconsidered.

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Removing Sound to Find Clarity

Lim’s main creative partner is British producer Will Goldsmith, who works as sugi.wa. Together, they move through folk, ambient music, chamber arrangements, indietronica and UK garage without treating genre fluidity as a technical spectacle.

“Clarity often comes from taking things away,” Lim explains in the album notes. On DAYDREAM, subtraction is more than an aesthetic decision. It removes some of the noise that makes difficult questions easier to avoid, leaving both the voice and the emotions deliberately exposed.

Photo Credit: Rin Tachihara

Songs Without a Final Answer

Initially developed during a session in Devon, “Nobody’s Home” introduces this approach through a restrained arrangement. Absence does not become a dramatic climax. It slowly changes the feeling of a physical space.

“The Hardest Thing”, Lim’s duet with Scottish singer-songwriter Tamzene, is similarly reluctant to impose a conclusion. Their voices ask whether love should necessarily become the hardest struggle without resolving the conflict.

Photo Credit: Rin Tachihara

“One Day I’ll Learn” frames regret as a possible starting point, while “I Got A Reason” finds enough of a reason to continue rather than a definitive explanation.

The collaborators deepen the record without turning it into a showcase. Cellist Ng Pei-Sian gives “I Can Only Carry You This Far” its chamber-like centre, while Chok Kerong, Kin Leonn, Aneirin Wee, Andrei Eremin and Ian Lee contribute to its production and engineering.

CZMOS INTERVIEW — CHARLIE LIM

Interview edited for length and clarity.

1. DAYDREAM is your first full-length album since CHECK-HOOK, released nearly eight years ago. Before this new record could take shape, what did you have to unlearn about the way you made music?

Probably the idea that effort is always audible, or that my work becomes better simply because I spent more time on it.

I have always been quite obsessive about production, and on previous records there was often this desire to explore every possibility available to me. More arrangement, more layers and more detail, more ways of pulling a song apart. I still love doing that, but at some point it actually becomes a kind of muscle memory. You know how to make something sound “good”, and that knowledge can actually prevent you from surprising yourself.

I had to unlearn some of that control with this new album. A lot of the earliest material came from improvisation and stream-of-consciousness jams. Instead of immediately asking, “How do I improve this?”, I tried to ask, “What is happening here, and how do I preserve this special moment?”

The biggest thing I had to unlearn was the need to demonstrate what I could do. The music became much more interesting once I stopped trying to impress myself. Collaborating with people like my co-producer Will (Goldsmith, aka sugi.wa) really helped me get out of my own head as well.

2. You have said that clarity often comes from taking things away. What was the most difficult thing to leave out of DAYDREAM, and what became clearer once it was gone?

Maybe the urge to explain everything. I guess that happened both musically and lyrically over time.

I definitely have a tendency to fill space when it comes to composition and production. But on this record, I became increasingly interested in allowing the absence of something to carry weight.

The same thing happened with the writing. I realised that sometimes trying to explain exactly what a song means actually makes it smaller. Once I started removing those explanations, I think the emotional centre of the songs became a lot clearer. You could hear the voice, the hesitation and the space around a phrase.

3. The idea of home has returned throughout your work, from “Welcome Home” to “Here We Are” and now “Nobody’s Home”. How has your understanding of home changed across these songs?

I wasn’t consciously thinking about those titles as a sequence until people started pointing it out, but I guess it can be quite revealing.

I moved around a lot as a kid and I guess I felt ok with the transience of it all. I think home was much more about the feeling of belonging. Where do I fit, where do I return to. And perhaps who do I return to.

“Nobody’s Home” is the new single off the album. For me, that song became partly about what happens when you abandon yourself, when you become so focused on preserving something outside of yourself that you stop inhabiting your own life.

So perhaps my understanding of home has moved from somewhere you arrive at to something you have to remain present for. Home is still people and places, of course…but to me I think it also means being able to live with yourself without running away.

Photo Credit: Rin Tachihara

4. “Here We Are” and DAYDREAM place your voice in very different spaces. How does your writing change when a song must hold a collective experience as well as your own?

The scale changes completely…with DAYDREAM, I guess I could be extremely specific or oblique. It wouldn’t matter. It’s sort of a diary entry; I could write something that was essentially a private conversation with myself and allow the listener to decide whether there was anything in it that belonged to them.

With “Here We Are”, which was Singapore’s National Day song, I had almost the opposite responsibility. You are tasked with being a designer, to create something that potentially needs to hold millions of people's experiences of the same country, and those experiences are obviously not identical. I think the danger with a song like that is trying to speak for everybody. I tried to find questions and emotions that could create enough room for people to locate themselves inside the song.

5. Since CZMOS is based in Italy, we always like to create a small connection between our guests and our country. Is there an Italian artist, musician, filmmaker, designer or other creative figure who has influenced or inspired you in some way?

Ennio Morricone comes to mind simply because I was on a Tarantino binge, but I’m only just realising what a legend he is. Please excuse my ignorance…I’m still learning so much more about his music and the films he scored for, but based on what I’ve heard so far, I really admire how distinctive his music can be without necessarily being complicated.

I’ve started doing more work in film scoring myself and I can really appreciate that restraint even more. Film music has to know when to speak and when to leave the image alone. The temptation as a musician is often to underline everything, but sometimes one very specific sound can do much more than a whole arrangement.

What Remains When the Noise Is Removed

That ability to know when to speak and when to leave space may be what defines DAYDREAM. Charlie Lim offers no definitive answers; instead, he creates a place where hesitation, silence and vulnerability can remain visible. After nearly eight years without a full-length album, his return does not try to prove how much he can add. It shows what can become clear when he chooses to take something away.