Music, Memory & The Myths We Build Around Our Idols: Yasmine Hamdan

I was raised in a home where Umm Kulthoum was revered, her voice played religiously every Thursday night over shai b laban before bed. Though she was the soundtrack to my parents' romance, I never inherited their devotion to ‘Egypt's Fourth Pyramid’. Despite the acclaim for her poetic songs and unmatched vocal power, her performances were marked by a distant, almost pragmatic composure.

Perhaps that’s exactly why I was drawn to Yasmine Hamdan. Her rebellious charm and ethereal voice were a stark contrast to the aloofness of ‘El Set’. She redefined what Arabic music could be for me.

I first discovered Yasmine through her cameo in 2014 film, Only Lovers Left Alive. I was too young, perhaps even too uncultured, to fully appreciate the context, yet her performance was unforgettable. The moment she sang 'Hal' quietly rerouted the course of my love of music - regardless of whether I grasped her true stature. I just felt something.

Over a decade on, I’m in Cairo staring at a black screen with my own initials on it, thinking of ‘Hal’, even the film, as I was waiting for Yasmine to get on our scheduled call. In a flash, she appears, curled up on a swivelling desk chair with a mug of something hot, maybe it was herbal tea or coffee - she was unwell, pausing between thoughts to catch her breath.  

“How are you? Where are you calling from?” she quickly says, before we proceed to talk about Cairo and the last time she performed here.

“All of those who know me know that I love Egypt,” she exclaims. “But I haven’t been there in a long time.” Her words carried the cadence of a poet, even in the small-talk between us. “I still would love to come and perform in Cairo, but… I want it to be special.”

Before long, our conversation moved onto her latest record, I Remember I Forgot, released in September. Marking her first full release in almost eight years, the record is a powerful, personal exploration of memory and identity. The timing and depth of the work seemed to resonate perfectly with the emotional climate of the Arab world, making it feel like an intentional commentary on political unrest. However, it turns out that this powerful parallel was entirely unintended.

“I had nothing in mind,” she bluntly said when I asked her what she had in mind when she first started working on the record. “I was just trying to heal from some difficult experiences. But I think it came out at a time when there was some space for it to be, and for people to connect to it.”

After her last album, Al Jamilat (2017), she spent years touring, an experience that, as much as it fulfilled her, led to burnout. "I had experienced a lot of beautiful things, but I felt that I had been emptied, like my vitality was kind of taken away by all of these things that I felt were like constraints.” When I asked her what kind of constraints she felt, she replied, “External things that had to do with the industry - things that had to do with the reality of being an artist, being asked to model, and selling your work in a way that I never felt connected to.”

“I wanted to take a break and reflect on why I was doing music after all this time,” she continues. “I never asked myself why I was doing music.”

Her tone softened into something unguarded, uncalculated. She started opening up about her battles with mental health before making the album. A one-year, post-tour hiatus stretched longer than expected. At that time, Lebanon was collapsing under political and economic turmoil. Then came the pandemic. Then, the devastating Beirut port explosion, and it all collided with her personal healing journey. There was no space to make sense of it all. “I had no idea how to answer my own questions,” she says quietly. “How am I going back to music? Why would I do it? And what connection would I want to privilege if I started again? I didn’t know.”

The turning point came unexpectedly, during a retreat in Sicily. Far from the chaos, she found herself surrounded by stillness, lush greenery, the sound of water, and the kind of quiet she hadn’t known in years. She began to reconnect with her body through yoga and meditation, tuning into the rhythm of life, finding solace in her friends and family, and in all sorts of activities that weren’t remotely related to music. 

“I was able to connect to nature, to harmony," she explained. "I think that vibration became what I wanted to communicate through the record.” She described it like “finding the first thread” after years of disconnection. Slowly, she started writing again, not for an audience, not for a label, but for herself. “I was very lost, I have to say, because I had lost the connection, so I had to rewire. And slowly, I managed to find the first thread.” 

Those early sketches evolved into I Remember I Forgot, a record born from her attempt to reclaim her inner harmony. She recorded pieces of it in scattered sessions with her close collaborator Marc Collin, sometimes scrapping entire takes just to preserve the feeling of spontaneity. The process was long, slow, and messy at times, but she didn’t care and was in no rush.

“I realised how happy I felt creating again. I didn’t want to make any compromises,” she told me. “I didn’t want to just finish a record because ‘you have to release it'. I wanted to respect my creative process.” When I commended her patience, her ability to live in the process instead of the product, she smiled. “For this album, yes. I’m not saying this is how it should go. But I couldn’t do it any other way.”

Sonically, I Remember I Forgot feels like a natural extension of her universe: moody, cinematic, stitched together with delicate electronics that build up and fade out (as if mirroring the ebbs and flows of her emotions), alongside oud textures, and her unmistakable voice which oscillates between the intimate and the spectral. Tracks like 'Mor' and 'The Beautiful Losers' carry the quiet ache of displacement and belonging, while 'Vows' glows with surreal intimacy, and she tempers pain and disappointment with the experimental groove that has become one of her trademarks.

What began as a personal meditation on memory, however, evolved into something much bigger, as the world around her shifted. When the conflict in Gaza started spreading across to neighbouring countries, she couldn’t listen to her own album for weeks. It suddenly felt too heavy, too close to everything she was witnessing. Yet when she returned to it later, she realised how eerily the music spoke to that pain. Without intending to, she had made a record that mirrored the collective heartbreak of the region. It was like the songs already knew. 

“I was afraid that, after October 7th, I would feel like I lost the connection,” she reflected. “But the contrary happened. I felt I was talking about something bigger than this moment or this place.”

Listening to I Remember I Forgot, it’s easy to feel that prescience. The album doesn’t shout; it is filled with quiet rage that feels like an elegy to everything that slips away - time, life and memory. 

One of the standouts from the album is ‘Hon’, a track that draws the listener in from the very start. It feels like both a love letter and a mourning hymn, a way of reaching for something that’s both here and gone. Yasmine recites the lyrics like spoken poetry instead of singing them, which I came to find out from her was a deliberate choice to deliver a certain message.

When I asked her about the song, she spoke softly, as though the memory could break if she touched it again. “I was in Beirut during the first anniversary of the explosion. I’d been completely blocked before I came back, but despite the trauma, something shifted while I was there. One word kept running through my head, 'Hon',” she recalled. “And then another came, and another, and I started working on the song. Despite everything, the city still had something to give, a kind of magic. And that was so important to me, because it opened everything.”

I asked her how she feels about the legacy she’s built. After all, she’s often described as a pioneer, someone who changed the way the world hears Arabic music. She paused for a moment, smiling faintly. “Legacy?” she repeated, almost amused. “I don't look at myself in the mirror, and I say. ‘Oh my god, I'm such a legacy.’ No, not at all. Honestly, for me, I do the music I do for myself first, and try to be as much as I can honest with myself.”

As our conversation drew to a close, I understood the feeling that drew me in all those years ago. Where Umm Kulthoum represented the flawless, untouchable perfection of a bygone era, Yasmine offers the counterpoint: raw, unfiltered, and unapologetic vulnerability. I Remember I Forgot captures this sentiment perfectly. Like much of her music, it doesn't demand attention; it quietly provides a space for feeling and sometimes even healing. It proves that the most resonant art is not found in perfection, but in simple human truth - a truth that is far more enduring than the myths we build around our idols.