Yasmine Hamdan
ياسمين حمدان
Musician
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Lebanon
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Paris,
France
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✓ Verified
Lebanese singer and songwriter whose spare, electronic reworkings of Arabic pop helped define a generation of underground Arab music.
Yasmine Hamdan first found an audience in the late 1990s as one half of Soapkills, the Beirut duo widely credited with launching the region’s independent music scene by pairing programmed beats with Arabic torch songs sung at a whisper.
After Soapkills, she carried that instinct into a solo career built between Beirut and Paris, releasing albums that treat old Arabic pop, forgotten dialects, and personal memory as raw material rather than nostalgia. Her voice, unhurried and slightly detached, became a signature within the wider Arab alternative scene long before the term “Arab alternative” had settled into common use.
A featured role and original song in Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive” introduced her to audiences well outside the region, though she has mostly resisted the pull toward crossover pop, staying close to the intimate, genre-blurring records that made her name in the first place.
Languages
Arabic, English, French
Representation
Independent