YASMINE HAMDAN - I Remember I Forget

We'd left her telling us about her Beirut, amid distances that are never truly insurmountable, obscene international silences and the poems of Mahmoud Darwich seen as small Noah's arks toward a possible salvation. And we find her again eight years later, with memory trailing a persistent feeling of love and hope.

In “I Remember I Forget”, the third album by Yasmine Hamdan, a singer-songwriter born in Beirut and now living in Paris, memory sits at the heart of everything: from the 2020 Beirut port explosion to the semi-permanent economic crisis of a Lebanon that is divided, contested, violated, wounded.

“I needed to root myself in a specific place, and it had to be Lebanon. My bond with what happened to it formed the ground from which I began writing and composing the album. However, gradually, over the course of the creative process, this place became a symbol, a metaphor, a catharsis for what is happening globally and is experienced universally”, she explains. And continues: “Despite the pain and intense emotions I felt watching what was happening in my birthplace, these feelings were outweighed by a sense of tenderness and familiarity that inspired hope and inspiration. Beirut has continued to be generous with me, in every way”.

Once again joined by Marc Collin (Nouvelle Vague), across the ten songs of “I Remember I Forget” Yasmine Hamdan returns to her roots, using trip-hop as a starting point to embroider textures that fuse electronics with traditional Arabic song. The explosion and dramatic collapse at the Beirut port is only the first of the memories sung like a prayer in “Hon”, in a bleak atmosphere that implies perdition, tremor and bewilderment, before the dance of “Shmaaili”, whose video portrays ordinary Palestinian women singing folk songs, and the reggae-tinged choral refrain of “Shadia” pull the listener away from such an overwhelming sense of grief.

The beautiful, broken-hearted losers of "The Beautiful Losers" bring that very drama back to the surface through an orchestral pulse and a slow crescendo that somehow consoles.

The songs on I Remember I Forget move between life and death, joy and pain. Here emerges the typically arabic pop stride of the title track, once again followed by a counterpoint song like “Vows”, as hypnotic and trickyana as needed to rekindle a fire that runs like magma through the veins and through the mind. It's the most tempestuous moment of an album that alternates between Hamdan's acquired European soul and her roots, in which the electronically charted Western escapes of more than twenty-five years ago, back in the days of Soap Kills, the duo she formed with Zeid Hamdan, regain life to act as a binding agent in an archaic ritual.

“No one is spared, no one is safe”, Yasmine sings again in “Daya3”, yet another moment of trip-hop in Arabic transcendence, helped along by Marc Collin's keyboards and Julien Decoret's harp and cello.

The closing could only be entrusted to the messianic “Reminiscence”, in fact the track closest to the splendor of “Ya Nass”. It's a final reunion with a past and a present that end up merging through a gaze only seemingly disenchanted. Yasmine sings dressed in black and dances like a Samia Gamal who has lost everything on the banks of a Nile that has dried up yet is still alive, confirming herself as the voice of a land terribly battered but not, for that, irrevocably lost.

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09/12/2025