A trailblazing comeback: Yasmine Hamdan weaves memory, grief, and joy into her first album in six years

When Yasmine Hamdan released Hon in February, the first single from her long-awaited new album, it immediately sent ripples through the Arab music scene and beyond.

A trailblazing voice in contemporary Arabic music, Yasmine has spent the past few years in deliberate silence, resisting the industry's relentless demand for constant output. For her, the pause was both an act of defiance and a response to a world that felt increasingly alienating — a refusal to create on anyone’s terms but her own.

“So, I decided to stop and only go back to working on music after a real necessity,” she told The New Arab.

“To write music only to get a sense of the essence of why I want to do it; I didn't want to be productive: I didn't want to play the game anymore," Yasmine shares. 

But after years of silence comes I Remember I Forget, Yasmine’s long-awaited album released on September 19, her first in over six years.

Co-created with French producer Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague fame, the record is described as “a free-spirited and vibrant album where memory, identity, and personal commitment intertwine with grace.”

Journey of a trailblazer

A singular voice at the crossroads of cultures, Yasmine Hamdan has been an inspiration to many since her debut in the duo Soapkills, and thanks to her internationally acclaimed 2013 solo debut Ya Nass (Hey People), followed by Al Jamilat (The Beautiful Ones) in 2017.

Born in Beirut, she grew up with travelling parents, fleeing the civil war in Lebanon, and experienced life in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Greece, and France from an early age.

Collaborating with filmmakers too, including her husband, the Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, it is when she performed her track Hal in the Jim Jarmusch film Only Two Lovers Left Alive in 2013, that her music was revealed to the world beyond the Arab region, and she was immediately praised as a remarkable singer, artist and performer.

She has been described as an evocative storyteller, a captivating performer, and an independent trailblazer.

But, from 2018, she was also going through profound sadness, with the troubles afflicting her home country, Lebanon. So, she retreated, disappearing from social media to spend time with her friends and family, travel, and practice meditation, among other things.

“I was going through multiple crises, an accumulation,” she explains. “With all the troubles we had in Lebanon, the economic collapse was like a holdup. The gangsters in power had just stolen people's money, and the banks were complicit. It was like witnessing the crash of a pseudo-system that is supposed to be safe. It was all a jumble of mixed feelings. I think I had a burnout.”

Many people around her were deeply impacted.

“My father, my whole family, all our friends. This was really a very big blow. Then you had COVID, and then you had the Beirut port explosion. That really finished me. But then, thank God, like in every tragedy, there's a saviour moment.”

In the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown, she was invited by friends to Sicily for a few months.

“To be able to connect to nature and to enter into some spiritual mode somehow, you know, the cycle of nature, the birds migrating, the colours of the sky and the sea, spending time with relatives, it just helped so much,” she continues.

“And I think it was really… healing. I don't like the word; it has been overused… But it was. It was like a process of regathering force.”

From pain to joy

There and then, she felt open to creativity again, even though it was still a laborious process at first. She had started working on some ideas, and in Sicily, she found the strength to work on them further.

“I started having more space inside of me in Sicily to work on the vision of what this album should be. And I had to exorcise a lot of really painful experiences, like the Beirut port explosion and this economic collapse. It was one of the triggers.”

She tried to work without rigidity. She returned home to Paris and began editing her work. However, she couldn’t help obsessing over small details, cutting and overthinking them, but calling people and trying new ideas helped.

“There was a lot of experimentation, and we were very patient; we were not in any rush. I didn't want to put any form of pressure,” Yasmine tells The New Arab, adding that she was seeking balance and harmony.

“I think this album sounds a bit sombre; there’s a form of darkness with a lot of luminosity, because it was what I was going through. And I felt really aligned with what I wanted to say. I wanted to mean everything I was saying in music and in words.”

The first four or five songs she wrote really helped her find her way. And the joy of composing music came to her again.

“A song like Shmaali, for example, has loss in it but also humour, even though it can be sorrowful, I wanted it to be victorious too, to be ‘dancey'. I always wanted it to be from a place of resistance, you know, connecting with your strength. To show that you can suffer and still remain strong."

A collective process

Her new work has been a collaborative effort, working with French producer Marc Colin, Palestinian poet Anas Alaili, and Syrian composer Omar Harb.

“It was really nice to work with Marc again, because we’ve known each other for such a long time," Yasmine shares. "He knows how I work and that I'm the captain of the ship. He has so much experience, and it's so much fun when we work together.”

Some of her family members also contributed to the making of the album, including her sister, cousins, the wife of her uncle, and friends of friends. All of this combined to create a very pleasurable process for her and the team, she says. 

“I had so much fun trying to imagine it. We even had Tuareg musicians, by pure coincidence: they came to the studio and they just brought the desert and the sand into my music.”

Hon was the first track she wrote for this record. The song discusses her experience of witnessing horror through social media and being unable to dissociate, with the lyrics, in Arabic, conveying her sense of despair.

“I was really living with these images in my house, in my room. Physically, I was in Paris, but my heart and soul were in Beirut,” she says.

"And I experienced the same thing with Gaza. After 7 October, I have the feeling that this album is about the present. I find it very much more relevant, it has many more layers, and I relate to it much more with what's been happening in the whole region, including Lebanon and Palestine.”

Political awakening

Since 2023, Yasmine Hamdam has been feeling the region's shared experience of “a colonial face” more deeply.

“Israel is a colonial project,” says. “This is something that has become very much clearer after 7 October, even for me. I'm articulating it much more now, in the sense that we understand the choreographies around it much more, and we remember… Going back to the album title, I Remember, I Forget…”

This is why, to her, singing in Arabic is a political act. She began singing in English with Soapkills in the late 1990s, then soon switched to Arabic, thanks to her experience of displacement throughout the Arab world, which allowed her to experiment with the different dialects of the language.

“It was so unfashionable when I started,” she says. “I was really looked down, and I heard, ‘oh, she's nuts, she’s crazy’. It was not at all trendy. I did it back then because I was, somehow, looking for myself in this mixed identity. I was looking for some answers. I also wanted to create this space where I could exist in the Arab world, sing in Arabic in my own way, my own terms.”

She wanted to express this very difficult place where one lives in two temporalities, ‘here ’and ‘there,’ where loved ones are in a vulnerable state, exposed to violence.

“Feeling their vulnerability coupled with your own sense of helplessness, this violence is ultimately transported into your own soul,” she said. “Your body keeps score, even if you’re watching at a distance.”

With this phenomenal comeback, Yasmine Hamdan will begin touring Europe soon, starting in Germany, to London (in February 2026), and then to Paris (in March).

The multilingual artist, with her remarkable wealth of pan-Arabic influences and her timely 21st-century electronic sound, offers us a soundtrack for our dark times, with the promise that joy cannot be extinct.

[Cover photo: Yasmine Hamdan photographed by Yias Nao]

Melissa Chemam is a French Algerian freelance journalist and culture writer based between Paris, Bristol and Marseille, and travelling beyond

Follow her on X: @melissachemam