He chuckled a little bit. “I’m down,” he said. “But that’s not who I’m doing it for.”
Abdelhamid’s debut solo release, the alluring, sophisticated “From Gaza, With Love” EP, released on Monday, finds ways for him to speak to each of these audiences. In the main, it is a document of intense sensual yen in the post-Drake mold, casually hopping across genres, from tender R&B to sleazy rock to hopped-up U.K. garage. But amid all the erotic frankness are jolting shards of family memoir (“My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s tone down when we’re playing piano”) and sprinkles of diasporic longing and aching for permanence: “I don’t want a Grammy, I want a family/Four daughters, one son, why you laughing?”
In Abdelhamid’s music, intense connection and remoteness often go hand in hand, something he attributes to the peripatetic life he’s led since childhood. With women especially, he said, he attaches quickly and deeply.
“It’s a bad thing, right? Because you shouldn’t find home in another person,” Abdelhamid said. “But I do find myself doing that because I’m so scattered and I don’t necessarily feel like I have a place to call home.”
Abdelhamid was born in Jerusalem to a French Algerian mother and a Palestinian Serbian father, and spent his early childhood in Gaza before his family moved to Jordan. At school, he spoke English. At home, French. In the Palestinian refugee camp where he went to play soccer after school, Arabic.
After high school, he left for college at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he imbibed American culture, joined a fraternity and ultimately got serious about making music.
He lived in a house there with Henry Morris, who records and produces as Playyard, and who produced most of “From Gaza, With Love.” From the beginning, Morris found Abdelhamid to be uncommonly focused. “I was like, ‘We don’t need to be grinding like that,’ but he wanted to work daily,” Morris said. “From Day 1, he was acting like it was a when, not an if.”
