From Soapkills to Only Lovers Left Alive: Yasmine Hamdan's Long Detour

Two People, a Beirut Apartment, and No Local Blueprint

Yasmine Hamdan's recording career began with Soapkills, the duo she formed with Zeid Hamdan while living in Beirut. Their debut album Bater arrived in 1999, at a point when there was essentially no independent electronic scene in the region to plug into.

Soapkills is widely credited as one of the first independent electronic acts in the Middle East, a distinction that has as much to do with there being no prior scene as with any single stylistic breakthrough. Their influence outlasted the project: musicians who followed through Beirut's 2000s and 2010s independent scene cite them as proof that a Beirut-based, Arabic-language electronic project could exist and find an audience at all.

A Solo Career Built on Reworked Tradition

After Soapkills, Hamdan moved into a solo career partly defined by reinterpreting older Arabic songs alongside original material. In a 2014 interview headlined around having no desire to be a good girl, she resisted being cast in a single lane, whether nostalgia act, political voice or straightforward pop artist.

A Cameo Alongside Tilda Swinton

Her profile expanded well outside music circles when she appeared in Jim Jarmusch's 2013 film Only Lovers Left Alive, performing her own song "Hal" in a Tangier nightclub scene alongside Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston's characters. The scene functions as a small showcase, and it introduced her voice to art-house audiences with no prior context for Soapkills.

Moving Between Forms

In an interview with EXBERLINER on moving from stage to screen and back, Hamdan discussed working across both without treating either as more legitimate. That is consistent with a career that has never settled into one clearly defined identity: from a Beirut duo with no scene to belong to, to a single scene in a vampire film watched far beyond any audience Soapkills originally had.