Two weeks ago, at a press event ahead of the premiere of Netflix’s new animated feature In Your Dreams, director Alex Woo hinted that audiences were in for something unexpected — and unusually melodic — from the film’s two leads, Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti.
“There’s a song in the movie, Simu and Cristin actually sing it, they perform it,” the director said. “I don’t know if you know, but Cristin’s an incredible singer, and Simu’s actually also very good. So we’re excited for the world to hear his performance.”
That performance has now arrived in the form of an acoustic track titled ‘The Holding On and the Letting Go,’ composed by Los Angeles singer-songwriter Daniel Blake. The song will be eligible for Best Original Song — and Gold Derby has premiered it ahead of its official Spotify release at midnight ET/9 p.m. PT.
While Milioti’s musical prowess is already well-documented — she’s both a newly minted Emmy winner and a Grammy winner thanks to Broadway’s Once — Liu’s vocals might be the film’s biggest surprise. His fans know he’s sung on screen before and even keeps a YouTube archive of his “various bops,” but In Your Dreams marks his most high-profile musical moment yet.
For Milioti, recording their duet was a highlight of the entire production.
“It was my favorite day,” she told MovieWeb. “I remember walking away from singing to Simu’s vocals that he had already laid down, and just getting to harmonize and be in a booth all day and sing it over and over and over. I loved it. I skipped out of there.”
In the film, Liu and Milioti play a married couple whose emotional drift pushes their kids into dreamland on a mission to save the family. Before parenthood, the couple performed as an indie folk band called Hypsonics — a name the cast only recently learned.
“We didn’t know it was called the Hypsonics until pretty recently,” Liu said at a recent press conference.
Read more: Simu Liu Calls Upcoming ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ A “Dream Come True”
“That’s the thing about the animation workflow. Cristin and I signed on four years ago. And then we come in and we’re not recording our lines with anybody. The lines are changing, the scenes are changing, the ending of this movie changed, at least for us, like four or five times over the course of the entire process. And I think our names changed and our band name changed.”
Milioti laughed about the shifting details: “I mix up things that we recorded and then didn’t make it in. Like Hypsonics.”
Liu countered with a punchline worthy of a behind-the-music special: “It’s probably why our sophomore album didn’t do that well. Because we’re a folk band. I just feel Hypsonics, that’s like EDM-forward.”
Netflix released In Your Dreams on 14 November 2025.
