Myrne: How Singapore's First Mad Decent Signee Rebuilt His Sound After His Father's Death

Diplo's Mad Decent signed exactly one Singaporean producer in the label's run of festival-trap signings, and he was twenty years old when it happened. Nine years, two more label deals and one family loss later, the same artist makes music that would get skipped over at the festival that made him famous.

Manfred Lim, who records as Myrne, started on piano at ten and reached Grade 8 before he ever opened a DAW. He studied political science at Singapore Management University while uploading tracks to SoundCloud, and in 2015 one of those uploads, the Softsins EP, got him signed to Mad Decent, the label Diplo built around festival-ready trap and future bass. He was the first Asian artist the label had signed. Three years later he became the first Singaporean to play Ultra Music Festival in Miami and Tomorrowland in Belgium, co-produced RL Grime and Daya's "I Wanna Know," and remixed Martin Garrix and Khalid's "Ocean." His 2019 debut album, In Search of Solitude, came out on Ultra Records under a multi-record deal. By any reasonable measure, Myrne had already done more than most Southeast Asian producers manage in a full career, and he did it before turning twenty-five.

The Four Stages

Then, in August 2024, he released an EP that had nothing to do with any of that. The Four Stages came out on This Never Happened, the Denver, Colorado label run by the melodic house producer Lane 8, four tracks titled "Peter's Theme," "One Sunrise At A Time," "Afterglows" and "Mirror Harmonics." Myrne described it as a record "about dealing with loss," dedicated to his late father, "without whom I would not be here making music today." He built it around the five stages of grief, minus one. He didn't believe full acceptance was something a person actually reaches, so he wrote four stages instead of five. It was also, by his own account, the first time he leaned on synthesizers and arpeggiators to carry a personal story rather than a drop.

For a Southeast Asian producer, the move was almost as unusual as the subject matter. Most of the region's electronic acts who break through internationally do it by climbing the festival circuit, chasing the same mainstage slots Myrne had already collected by his mid-twenties. Walking away from that pipeline toward a boutique house label most casual fans outside dance music have never heard of is an unlikely move for someone with a multi-record deal at Ultra Records, and he made it anyway, for a reason no PR cycle would have scripted.

A Quieter Register

The releases since have stayed in that register. Heal, put out through This Never Happened in 2025 with the ambient-pop producer Shallou, put its title track at No. 1 on SiriusXM's Chill channel, about as far from a Mad Decent block party as a chart position gets. In June 2026 he followed it with the Superstition EP, including the track "Eventide," on the same label. None of it is built for a drop. It's built for headphones, or for the kind of late-set house and melodic techno room that rewards patience over pyrotechnics, which happens to be exactly what Lane 8 has spent a decade building This Never Happened's whole identity around. The label's catalogue runs through Kasbo, Le Youth and Ashibah, names that circulate on melodic house and chill-adjacent playlists far more than they ever did on a Mad Decent tracklist. Myrne's name is now on that same release sheet, between artists who never had a mainstage to walk away from.

That's a real gamble for a producer whose name recognition was built on Ultra Miami and Tomorrowland credits, and Singapore's own club calendar, heavy on tech house and festival trance, doesn't obviously reward the shift either. Myrne isn't chasing a mainstage callback with this material, and he isn't pretending the old chapter didn't happen. His catalogue runs straight through, Softsins to Superstition, under the one name, no rebrand to mark the turn. The producer who co-wrote a Mad Decent festival single and the one who wrote a eulogy in four movements never stopped being the same person. He's just decided, after a decade of evidence to the contrary, that the quieter record is the one worth making.