Saint Levant Is Building a Career Out of Refusing to Choose

A Hotel Named Deira

Saint Levant, born Marwan Abdelhamid, built his 2024 debut album around a building that no longer exists in the form he knew it. Deira was a hotel on the Gaza coast that his father built in the 1990s. The album that carries its name, released on June 7, 2024 through SALXCO and Universal Arabic Music, is named after it directly.

By the time the record came out, the hotel had already been destroyed. In interviews given in December 2024 to NPR affiliate KPBS, Saint Levant described returning to the subject repeatedly rather than treating it as settled history: "Deira was bombed in November of 2023. The terracotta colors are still there, but the inside is all bombed." He put it more bluntly in the same run of interviews: "You see things that you love get destroyed."

Four Languages, Sometimes in One Verse

The album spans hip-hop, pop rap, contemporary R&B and Arabic pop, sung across Arabic, English, French and Spanish, sometimes switching inside a single verse. That is not a marketing conceit. Abdelhamid was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian-Algerian father and a French-Serbian mother, raised in Gaza until 2007, then in Jordan, then educated in the United States. The code-switching is closer to a transcript of how he actually speaks than a stylistic choice.

Reception was not uniformly glowing, and it is worth saying so. Alongside praise for its ambition, user reviews aggregated on Album of the Year repeatedly flagged the same tension: that the record's romantic register and its political weight sometimes pull against each other rather than combining.

The Follow-Up That Traded Testimony for Tenderness

His 2025 follow-up moved in a different direction. Love Letters is, as the title promises, largely about love rather than dispossession. For an artist whose debut was built on a destroyed building, that shift invited an obvious accusation: that he was softening.

He has answered it directly. Speaking to GRAMMY.com in June 2025, he framed speaking out as an obligation that does not expire because an album cycle changed: "You can't claim Palestine and not talk. You can't claim to be Arab and not talk. You can't claim to be human and not talk."

Refusing the Simpler Version

The pattern across both records is a refusal to accept the simplified version of himself that would be commercially easier. A purely political artist would be legible to Western press. A purely romantic pop artist would be legible to radio. Saint Levant has declined both, and the friction in his reviews is largely the sound of listeners wanting him to pick one.

Whether that refusal is a long-term career strategy or simply a description of who he is, two albums are not yet enough to say. What is documented is that he has been offered the simpler path repeatedly, in interviews and in criticism, and has not taken it.