On 8 December 2017, I found myself arguing with a taxi driver over directions. New to Beirut and still a freshman, I hadn’t yet learned my way around the city. I was already late, but stubbornly determined. I couldn’t miss Yasmine Hamdan’s talk at Dar El-Nimer. The driver, visibly annoyed, let me out mid-ride, and I ended up walking the rest of the way, tracing the streets on urgency and shopkeepers’ directions.

I’d missed the talk, but not the Q&A. When the floor opened for questions, I threw in three, which Yasmine Hamdan answered generously. Afterwards, she signed my copy of Al Jamilat, which I’d bought the night before at her Grand Factory concert, the opening act for the Beirut & Beyond International Music Festival, and part of her album world tour. That was her latest record then, and, as it turned out, her last for quite a while.

Now, eight years later, Hamdan returns with I remember I forget, her third studio album. After the whirlwind of touring Al Jamilat, she had stepped back to take time for herself. Then the world unravelled: from the Beirut explosion, the economic collapse, the pandemic, and the genocide in Gaza. The result, nearly a decade later, is a ten-track project steeped in memory, displacement, loss, and grief.

“[The album] was a response to trauma, for sure,” she tells me over a video call. “But I managed, with this album, to transform that experience, first of all, into a space of creativity. Not only for myself, but for the collaborators, musicians, and everyone who helped bring this record to life.”

The album came from a place of “suffering and despair,” she says. The kind of despair that propels you forward only because there’s no other way to go. I remember I forget lives in that liminal space, between motion and stillness, hope and exhaustion, memory and oblivion. Even its title holds that duality. “It carries humour,” she says. “It carries past, memory, and rupture. It can be interpreted in so many ways. You can also have fun with everything that comes with it, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously either. Because this record is also addressing some subjects that may be heavy emotionally, I needed to have something to balance.”

The same ebb and flow runs throughout the record. Heavy themes made lighter by contrast, through playful lyrics, buoyant arrangements, and Yasmine’s sultry, disarming vocals. “Let’s go sleep, shall we? And in bed, cuddle me,” she sings on “Shadia”, a Nubian-influenced track whose title nods to the beloved Egyptian actress and singer. 

Since the beginning of her career, Yasmine has never shied away from revisiting the past, reinterpreting it, celebrating it, and giving flowers where they’re due. In the early 2000s, as one half of the pioneering alternative duo Soapkills alongside Zeid Hamdan, she breathed new life into classics by Asmahan, Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Nour El Huda, and others. She’s carried that instinct through her solo work, and I remember I forget is no exception.

On “Mor,” she reimagines a muwashah once famously sung by Sabah Fakhri, while “Shmaali” draws from a Palestinian folk tarweedeh, an encrypted song form that dates back to the late Ottoman and early British Mandate eras. These songs, often preserved through oral tradition by women in rural communities, functioned as expressions of identity, longing, and resistance, emotional and political.

The tarweedeh form is built on code: layers of disguised meaning meant to conceal intent from outsiders, whether colonial authorities or prison guards, while remaining legible to those within the community. The concealment lies in extra letters or syllables slipped into words, deliberate shifts in pronunciation or dialect, or even reversing or rearranging phrases. At times, the simple insertion of the Arabic letter “ل” (“l”) was enough to transform a familiar phrase into something indecipherable to the uninitiated.

Yasmine had stumbled upon the song before the genocide in Gaza, deciding to include it in the album, and tragically, for Palestine, folk songs are always relevant, always timely, always needed. They sit on the edge of the shelf, ready to be reached for whenever history repeats its cruelties, which most often, it does. 

Since October 7, many artists have revisited the tarweedah form, seeking solace and resistance in heritage. But Yasmine’s approach was different: she wanted it to sound “victorious.” That sense of glory bursts in the second half of the track, fuelled by a mejwez-esque tone from her long-time collaborator and album producer Marc Collin’s vintage synthesiser, without it being “too referential.” The accompanying video, directed by Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Jaafari, deepens that spirit through archival images of traditional Palestinian dance, weddings, and celebration.

“[I thought] it needs to be joyful and needs to be like a hymn,” Yasmine elaborates on the track. “The fact that these women were able to resist occupation, domination, authority and oppression, and to escape the control of the jailer. Instead of him excluding them, they managed to exclude him.” 

In Levantine folk tradition, songs are often sung collectively by a group of women, and Yasmine stayed true to tradition. She brought her sister Tina to record the chorus alongside her and layered it into the track. The album credits also list other family members who contributed to the chorus on “The beautiful losers”, my personal favourite on the album. A song that feels like a love letter, a gentle pat on the shoulder. 

“For this song in particular, I’m talking about the collapse,” Yasmine says. “It’s very much in relation to my father, the hold-up that happened in Lebanon, and all the drama that people lived. It talks about my anger vis-à-vis what happened. But also, I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about a group, a collective. I wanted it to be echoing something much bigger than my own self.” 

“We can lose, but remain graceful and beautiful,” she elaborates about the track. “You can lose, but it’s not at all a contradiction to say that you continue. You’re not hopeless when you lose. It’s not an end in itself. What do you lose and what do you gain? Some people are losing their humanity. We’re experiencing losses all the time and things that are dissonant in our lives. It’s part of life. How do you react to it? What do you do with that?”

The album answers that question in its own way. “We, the beautiful losers, hang on. We’re beautiful and we carry on,” she sings on the track. One only needs to look at friends and family across the region, from Palestine to southern Lebanon to Syria, to see how true it is. It’s one battle after another, yet we are left with no choice, for better or worse, but to carry on: out of hope, out of despair. “We don’t have another choice, honestly,” she tells me.

Yasmine understands the need for a pause, too. With the shock of everything that had happened in Beirut from 2020 onward, and what continues in Palestine now, left her in a kind of writer’s block. Ironically, it was a visit to a broken Beirut a year later that unclogged the creative blockage and led her to write the first lyric of the album.

“At that moment, summer of 2021, the economic collapse was so severe, so heartbreaking, so dramatic. I came back with physical problems, another layer of trauma, yet I realised that this place, despite everything, had something enormous to give me. It inspired me, and that helped me find my way.”

The opening track “Hon” marks the first track she wrote for the album and the only one to feature a co-writing credit, shared with poet and longtime friend Anas Alaili, who, as a Palestinian, shares a “different but same” experience with her.

“There was one sentence from his poem that opened the door for me,” she says of the line that broke through her block. “I didn’t keep everything, just one or two sentences here and there. There’s this sentence that says: ‘Some people linger / And some go absent.’ It’s the word absent that really moved me, because I feel I didn’t leave, I’m just absent. And in the absence, there’s always the promise of a return. That was something I felt in all of us, the diaspora, the people who left. We never left, really.” She adds that the meaning of “Hon” applies as much to Gaza as it does to Lebanon, a reflection of displacement, longing, and the enduring presence of those who remain connected to home, even from afar.

Yasmine has lived her life in distance, having spent much of her childhood away from Beirut, moving between Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Kuwait, and Greece, and eventually moving to Paris in 2005. Living in France gave her access to more musicians and propelled her into her solo career, and with I remember I forget, she opens up about what she also lost living abroad.

“With this album, I wanted to write my diaspora experience openly,” she says. “Maybe I didn’t talk about the guilt, because this is another subject we’re all suffering from. We do feel guilty, we do feel desperate, because we feel helpless. There are so many feelings that can be painful, but at the same time, I think they give us energy. It’s something that makes us more political, and maybe better people in some ways, or at least to realise how much love we have, people we love around us that we care for.”

Lyrically, Yasmine’s exploration of diaspora themes is less about guilt or longing for home and more about the weight of distance, burdened with constant worry and anxiety. This is how “Hon”, meaning “Here” in Arabic, was born, following the Beirut explosion, when she truly felt that distance. The opening track begins with an almost forensic question, as if arriving at a crime scene:

“What happened here?” she sings. “A collapse, and a mountain of love.” She continues, “Day after day, I am questioning my phone,” a nod to doomscrolling. “There is a dead body in my bedroom”, echoes the intrusion of tragedy into the safety of her Paris home. “Every day, they rehearse their killing. I can’t dissociate.”

Instrumentally, the track is layered with a thumping, muffled heartbeat that runs throughout, ratcheting up anxiety and tension until it releases in the second half with a sombre, alarming emergency siren, building toward the sound of shattering glass. That’s how the album feels, gripping you by the neck, sometimes letting go, sometimes holding on. It’s playful in a raw, uncanny way, as if Yasmine is teasing the edge between anxiety and pleasure. The album’s overarching sound moves like an ominous silence before a storm, one that may arrive, or may only ever threaten. 

The nonlinearity of the album is reminiscent of the patterns of grief and trauma. A good day interrupted by a resurfacing memory, a livestreamed genocide. The mind trying desperately to push it away, the losses etched into the body.

There’s an unmissable physicality to Yasmine’s music, a sense that her songs are felt as much as they are heard. Some lines read like a self-diagnostic check-in with the body. “It’s foggy, my mind’s a mess,” she confesses on “Reminiscence”, an aptly titled closing track which builds and culminates with hypnotic oriental beats. “I try to escape, my body remembers,” she sings, as a reminder that the body keeps score when the mind cannot. Listening to her music is a physical experience too: it weighs on the heart, sinks to the stomach, then travels to your hips, moving, shaking, dancing it off. Teetering between sensuality and anxiety, the record exists in its own world while remaining tethered to reality. I remember I forget feels like dancing intimately with a loved one while a war rages outside. Brimming with honesty and rawness, this is perhaps the most unguarded, most revealing Yasmine we’ve ever heard.

“This is me, really me, without makeup,” she tells me. “That’s what I wanted with this album, because I felt like I didn’t want to be cute anymore. I just want to be as close as I can to what I am at that moment. I didn’t want to hide it, and I wanted to feel completely comfortable with it. I needed a change, also. I felt like I stopped music for a reason. I was going through multiple crises, personally and professionally. I felt completely emptied, and I felt there was something not as unique as I wanted it. I wanted to be more aligned with who I am, and to let go of some things. I wanted to take the chance to talk about my fragilities or vulnerabilities more.”

While her emotions are laid bare on the record, Yasmine takes a step back in imagery, absent from the album’s music videos and visuals. The exception is the cover: a collaged photograph taken by her father, Hani, showing a young Yasmine gazing almost defiantly at the camera in a Pierrot outfit. The cover was conceptualised by the Kandalaft Research and Design office in collaboration with Yasmine and her sister Tina.

“There was a lot of emotion in her eyes, and this was somehow me at the moment,” she speaks about her younger self, depicted on the cover. “I don’t have many pictures of myself. I hated pictures. In all my pictures, I was either crying or hitting somebody trying to photograph me. The fact that my late father took this picture also had a meaning for me.” 

“In this picture, I’m disguised in this character that is supposed to be Pierrot. This marginal, a bit melancholic, a bit romantic, a bit of a ‘loser’ character. I really like that lyricism. It was, of course, Pierrot, the Arabic version. I remember that this was a costume I was so in love with. I always loved wearing huge costumes where I would be lost in them, and I would be completely transformed. It felt really fun to look a bit weird in some things that felt right for me, and never to be in the princess dress. I never did in my life, and I was completely nauseated by all these stories about Cinderella. I was more interested in these characters, because they carry the emotions.”

With I remember I forget, Yasmine, our Pierrot, carries all the emotions, hers and ours, stripped of costume, fully exposed, then sings them with us, the beautiful losers, in the hope of making the weight a little lighter for all of us.

“On June 24, 1999, Soapkills was performing at Circus when an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon’s electricity infrastructure interrupted the concert,” Yasmine reflects in an Instagram post shared on January 26 of this year, the day Israel was meant to leave southern Lebanon and, predictably, hasn’t. “Power went out, everything went pitch black and quiet, and everyone stayed in. When the bombing ceased, we decided to resume the concert. Our K7 recorder captured everything in real time, as it happened—the concert, the pause, the hidden tracks. We pressed 500 copies of this unfiltered recording and distributed them organically. Listen to the soundtrack, minutes before the strike.”

“Resuming” seems to be the bane of our existence as Arabs, and Yasmine has been doing it beautifully since. Despite everything, she is still singing. And for us, all the beautiful losers, we have no choice but to resume too.