Saint Levant

A hotel in Rimal

Marwan Abdelhamid was born in Jerusalem on 6 October 2000, to a Palestinian-Serbian father, Rashid Abdelhamid, and an Algerian-French mother, Maria Mohammedi. The family moved to the Rimal district of Gaza City, where his parents built Al Deira, a 22-room hotel on the seafront. He attended the American International School in Gaza until the Battle of Gaza in 2007 pushed the family out to Amman.

The household was trilingual by circumstance rather than design: French at home, English at school, Arabic everywhere else. He learned piano and saxophone, and played football in the Al-Wehdat setup. In 2018, aged 17, he moved to California, and graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 2022 with a degree in International Relations.

Before the stage name existed he was posting tracks such as 'Jerusalem Freestyle' and 'Nirvana in Gaza' alongside TikTok videos on Palestinian history and on masculinity in Arab culture. The name he settled on folds Yves Saint Laurent into the Levant — a joke about luxury and a statement of origin in three syllables.

Very Few Friends, and what followed

'Very Few Friends', released in November 2022, moved between English, French and Arabic inside a single verse structure, and did roughly two million YouTube views in its first month. It reached number one on Spotify in nineteen countries, number two in the United States, and number two on the Global Viral 50.

The year after brought the EP From Gaza, with Love, the GQ Middle East Man of the Year title, and an appointment in May 2023 as Dior's first Middle East fragrance ambassador. In April 2024 he played Coachella, using the set to talk about Gaza. A month later, on 22 May 2024, he appeared at a Palestine benefit concert at the Zénith in Paris in aid of Medical Aid for Palestinians.

The debut album Deira arrived on 7 June 2024 through SALXCO and Universal Arabic Music — a compact record, a little over twenty minutes, pulling raï and chaabi through hip-hop and R&B. MC Abdul, Kehlani, Cheb Bilal, TIF and Sol Band appear on it, with Zeyne and Naïka on backing vocals. The singles ran ahead of it: 'Deira' on 23 February, '5am in Paris' on 11 April, 'Galbi' on 3 May. It charted at 35 in Switzerland, 84 in France and 131 in Wallonia. The title track is named for the family hotel, which was destroyed by Israeli bombardment. He toured the album across Europe and North America from 22 September to 15 December 2024.

Afandi, and the decision to drop English

The EP Love Letters / رسائل حب followed on 14 February 2025, six tracks long, with a deluxe edition on 22 August 2025 that added the Tunisian rapper Nordo, the Egyptian mahraganat singer Fares Sokkar, and the Algerian band Babylone.

Afandi / افندي, released on 21 August 2026, is the harder turn. Twelve tracks, almost all in Arabic, every song produced and engineered by the Tunisian producer Souhail 'Ratchopper' Guesmi. The title refers to the afandi — the suave, expensively dressed gentleman of Arab popular memory — and the record works that register through 1990s Arab pop and R&B rather than through the Western frames of the Deira material. 'Sabah El Ward' opened it as a single on 22 May 2026. 'Mitsubishi' pairs him with the Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe; 'Maskara' brings in the Palestinian singer Mohammed Assaf. 'Leil El Sahraneen' and 'Cinderella' sit at the slower end.

The album landed inside an argument about who speaks for Palestinian music. On 1 August 2026 the Ramallah rapper Shabjdeed released 'SLV', a diss track aimed at him, and the exchange became a wider debate over representation, class and audience.

Where he stands in late 2026

The commercial standing is now partly a fashion and philanthropy business. In June 2026 he became Prada's first Palestine-born ambassador. A lip oil called Kalamantina, launched with Huda Beauty in July 2025, drew criticism over the commercialisation of a song title; proceeds were redirected to Médecins Sans Frontières. His 2048 Fellowship became the 2048 Foundation in 2024, and in early 2026 it began issuing Loubani Grants of $5,000 each to forty Palestinian artists.

The live business has been growing on its own terms. An Australian run in June 2026 included two sold-out nights at Melbourne Town Hall, on 2 and 4 June, for the RISING festival, plus City Recital Hall in Sydney and the Princess Theatre in Brisbane. On 13 August 2026, a week before Afandi came out, he played Boulevard Abdali in Amman.

Forty-one dates, and the ones that moved

The Afandi World Tour was announced in July 2026 — a Live Nation production of 41 dates across North America, Europe and the Middle East, with presale on 21 July and general sale on 24 July. It was to open in Boston on 12 September 2026.

On 2 September 2026 he posted that his US visa, having been approved, had been reopened: 'After the initial approval of my visa application to come see you in the US, I've been unexpectedly asked to undergo additional background checks,' which 'could take a number of months'. The North American leg went back to spring 2027 — Ottawa on 19 March, then the United States from Boston on 27 March, with Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, San Diego, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver to follow. Reporting on the postponement set it against a broader tightening of US entry: more than 175,000 visas revoked since the start of the current administration, and immigrant visa appointments paused globally.

Europe and the Gulf were unaffected. The European leg opens at the National Stadium in Dublin on 29 October 2026, then Radiant-Bellevue on 1 November and Le Zénith in Paris on 2 November, continuing through Amsterdam, Berlin, Stockholm, Madrid, Athens and Istanbul. The Gulf dates are Doha on 11 December, Muscat on 12 December and Dubai on 19 December.

Layali Al Afandi

The tour carries a staged show called Layali Al Afandi, built around the Levantine cabarets of the 1990s and the Beirut nightlife of that period — a narrative production, by its own description, combining live music, storytelling and stage design rather than a straight run of singles.

The evidence from 2026 suggests a set that moves between languages and decades without much explanation. At the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal on 2 July he played sixteen songs over eighty minutes, from 10pm to 11.20pm: 'On This Land' first, then 'DALOONA', 'Wazira', 'Let Her Go', 'NARI NARI NARI', with 'Very Few Friends' placed sixth rather than held back for the end. 'Deira' folded in Rachid Taha's 'Ya Rayah'; he covered Babylone's 'Zina'; a DJ-set segment with Abu Levant broke the middle; 'SABAH EL WARD', 'Nano', 'DO YOU LOVE ME?' and 'Kalamantina' closed it out.

At Melbourne Town Hall on 2 June the classical Arabic group Tarab Ensemble, founded by Yousef Alreemawi, opened. The Main Hall was washed pink and purple, with a standing floor and a full upper gallery holding keffiyehs and flags. He broke mid-set to talk about the censorship of his activism, saying that if he could not speak freely he would sing, and named Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan and Congo. He covered Wael Kfoury's 'Law Hobna Ghalta' and ran a Shakira remix through Arabic instrumentation. The set ran around 45 minutes to the interval, with an encore after, and the room stayed put afterwards asking for more. Farrago's reviewer read the night as a demonstration that popular music can function as a uniting and empowering force during political unrest rather than as frivolity.