Charlie McDonald unveils a memory's bittersweet echo in "Time"

Emerging singer-songwriter Charlie McDonald shares his stunningly emotive new single "Time," a rich cinematic pop ballad that delves into the most delicate sections of the heart. Following the heartwrenching debut "You Broke Me," which left 120,000 listeners entranced, "Time" possesses a more affluent and even more refined palette full of dramatic cinematic orchestrations with soft R&B textures, all of which combine to form a smooth vehicle for Charlie's undeniably powerful soulful voice.

Written about a decade after its author lost his best friend in a car accident, Charlie's despair had a quiet, almost accidental source. Clearing out a closet, he found old photos, pieces of a friendship that had once seemed endless but had fallen quietly into the shadows of memory. As Charlie calls it, this wave of guilt and sadness evoked something deeply human: a yearning for remembrance and forgetting, a dancing tango of remembering and losing. For lovers of evocative storytelling and emotionally lush melodies, Charlie McDonald's "Time" is a masterclass in susceptibility and craftsmanship.

"Time" slips away from easy pigeonholing, but it comes from a place in time when Harry Styles' "Sign of the Times" started to blare in a London record store. While the two songs couldn't be further apart sonically, the emotional tenor of that brief encounter has remained with him. Later that same evening, right before a Sigur Rós show, Charlie's creative dam burst, and in less than three minutes, the bones of "Time" came together with the kind of raw, urgent honesty for which the song is known.

With the quietly unwinding vocals, it's a song that implores you to face your fragile connection to memory. "Time" is shown here as both a friend and a thief, preserving moments but also taking them away. Charlie McDonald's "Time" is a beautifully crafted ballad of tremendous emotional depth and cinematic grandeur, a song in which the artist's continued blossoming toward a richly atmospheric and heart-breakingly human sound is all but guaranteed.

Link with Charlie McDonald: Instagram