NDP Theme Song 2025: Here We Are by Charlie Lim, Kit Chan and The Island Voices Unveiled for SG60

Singapore turns 60 this year. And while the celebrations will no doubt come with fanfare, fireworks, and the obligatory parachute stunts, it’s the music — always the music — that sneaks up on you. That makes you feel something. That reminds you what this whole nation-building thing was really about.

Here We Are, the official theme song for NDP 2025, dropped on YouTube this week. Written by singer-songwriter Charlie Lim and composer-arranger Chok Kerong, and performed by Charlie, Kit Chan, and vocal ensemble The Island Voices, the song is at once intimate and expansive. There are no rousing stadium chants or over-polished pop tricks here — just quiet strength, layered harmonies, and a slow, dignified reckoning with where we’ve come from and what it took to get here.

The lyrics don’t try to impress you either. They just tell the truth. “No matter the weather, through the storms and changes,” Charlie sings in his trademark restraint. Kit Chan — whose voice we all hear whenever we think of Home — steps in like muscle memory. Together, the pair aren’t trying to make you weep. They’re trying to make you pause.

Both artists are no strangers to this ritual. Kit Chan last anchored the nation’s soundtrack in 1998 with Home and again in 2007 with There’s No Place I’d Rather Be. Charlie most recently gave us Room at the Table in 2020. That they’ve both returned for SG60 feels like more than nostalgia. It’s a kind of quiet baton-passing, a musical handshake across generations.

Produced by Dr Sydney Tan, the track is carefully textured — lush but not loud, proud but not preachy. With The Island Voices lifting the chorus, the song lands somewhere between hymn and heartbeat and that feels right for SG60.

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This year’s National Day Parade commemorates six decades since Singapore became an independent republic in 1965. Held at both the Padang and Marina Bay for the first time, NDP 2025 promises a city-scale celebration. Red Lions will parachute onto the Padang. Naval divers will plunge into Marina Bay in perfect coordination. Fireworks, light projections, and a special tribute by the Republic of Singapore Air Force will thread across the skyline. And on 10 August, five heartland locations will join in with their own celebrations.

The theme ‘Majulah Singapura’ is a paean to the past but also to the present and the future. A reminder that progress is not a given — it’s a decision, renewed each year, each generation.