PARIS — It was a familiar Paris hipster scene. The crowd behind the discrete façade of the Tigre club in the First Arrondissement were in skinny jeans with carefully tousled hair and clutching expensive drinks. Marc Collin, co-founder of the cult electropop collective Nouvelle Vague was setting up vintage keyboards on a tiny stage. The female drummer picked up her drumsticks and the skinny-cool guitarist settled into place. Then the singer, in jeans and a black vest, looking out from behind long dark hair, took the mic and began to sing.

In preparation for the release of her new, self-named album, the Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan was doing a small gig in Paris, and as the crowd swayed to the music, their eyes fixed on the stage, it didn’t seem to matter if only 10 percent of the people there understood the words she was singing.

As with her past work — which includes the groundbreaking underground Beirut duo Soapkills, an album with the legendary Paris musician Mirwais, who produced Madonna’s album “Music,” and a collaboration with the alternative American rock group CocoRosie — Ms. Hamdan is looking again to bring Arabic singing out of the field of world music and into the musical mainstream.

“I love Arabic culture, and I hate how the Arab world is portrayed in the press today,” she said in an interview after a rehearsal last month in a cafe in the 10th Arrondissement. “I sing in Arabic as a statement. It’s art and it’s a challenge.”