Jazzy is always cooking up bangers

Jazzy is all about bringing the “good times and good vibes”. When the Dublin DJ and singer’s career took off three years ago, she’d describe her musical M.O. by saying: “If you can’t play it in the club, it’s not Jazzy!” But that mission statement only tells part of her story. The 28-year-old’s soaring dance anthems have burst out of their intended home in the club and onto TikTok, streaming playlists, and mainstream radio in the UK and her native Ireland.

Jazzy, or Yasmine Byrne to whoever’s checking her well-thumbed passport, co-writes and sings massive house bangers. Later this week, she’ll bring them to Glastonbury for the first time when she performs at the festival’s open-air nightclub, Levels. “I’m absolutely buzzing – I’ve never been but it’s been on my [wish] list for a while, and I’ve heard some crazy stories,” she says.

You’ll be familiar with Jazzy’s floor-filling breakthrough hits. ‘Make Me Feel Good’, her soulfully pulsing collaboration with fellow Dubliners Belters Only, became a summer 2021 club anthem, then scaled the charts in early 2022. She followed it with her debut solo single, 2023’s ‘Giving Me’, a gorgeous organ house heater filled with sensual self-confidence: “Hold tight to your man ’cause I’m movin’ in.”

Both ‘Make Me Feel Good’ and ‘Giving Me’ earned diamond certifications in Ireland, while the latter became the biggest debut single of 2023 in the UK. And the smashes have kept on coming: Last year’s ‘Somedays’, an anthemic collaboration with Australian DJ-producer Sonny Fodera and British DJ-producer D.O.D., bagged a BRIT Award nomination and has over 157million streams on Spotify alone.

On Friday (June 20), right in time for Glasto, the NME 100 artist dropped her latest single ‘High On Me’, an arms-aloft summer throbber she made with another in-demand DJ-producer, London-based house alchemist Rossi. Jazzy has a simple rule for picking collaborators: “Anyone I play out [in my DJ sets] is someone I want to work with.”

“I was a very well-behaved child – I never went to clubs before I was supposed to”

Jazzy’s music may be ubiquitous, but the woman herself has kept a slightly lower profile – at least so far. When she joins NME on Zoom on a sunny June morning, she’s sitting in a coffee shop in Crumlin, the Dublin suburb where she grew up and still lives, wearing noise-cancelling headphones and sipping something chilled. She’s immediately warm and friendly, and self-effacing in a way that doesn’t feel deliberate.

“I play anything down,” she says of her growing list of achievements. “No matter how big it is, I tell myself it’s not a big deal.” Surely that was hard when ‘Make Me Feel Good’ and ‘Giving Me’ both hit Number One in Ireland? “I’ve gotten quite good at it now, to be honest; I haven’t had too many freak-outs. So yeah, I feel well with it.”

She’s gently resistant to any hint of pretentiousness. When NME asks how she sees her “purpose as an artist”, she throws back the question with a chuckle: “My purpose? That’s really deep! I don’t think I can answer that.”

Jazzy may be remarkably grounded for someone with 10.7million monthly Spotify listeners – more than any other Irish female solo artist, including Enya and Sinéad O’Connor – but her drive is formidable. In primary school, she committed so fully to her free violin lessons, provided by a scheme called The Music Project, that her Crumlin neighbours dubbed her “the girl with the violin”.

She completed her grades and could have become a violin teacher. “When I finished secondary school, I actually went back to the [primary] school where I learned and did a whole year as the assistant violin teacher,” she says. As a teenager, Jazzy also loved singing in the school choir, where her first solo was a serious vocal test: ‘Killing Me Softly’, as covered by the Fugees. “I loved Lauryn Hill – I used to sing that song for the four walls at home, so I probably asked for it,” she says.

“People would come into Tesco and say ‘you’re the girl from that song’”

While teaching the violin, Jazzy reached a musical fork in the road that she hadn’t been anticipating. “I was actually a very well-behaved child, so I never went out [to clubs] before I was supposed to,” she says with a laugh. “But for my 18th birthday, my friend took me to my first DJ gig, which was Amine Edge & Dance at [Dublin club] Sin.” She notes approvingly that the French duo were “really big in G-house”, a bass-heavy blend of dance and hip-hop.

“I remember absolutely loving it and thinking, ‘What is this scene?’” she recalls, still sounding rapt. “And after that, I just dived in and started finding all the records that I loved [from the club].” On subsequent nights out, Jazzy found herself focusing on the DJs. “I would think to myself, I really want to learn how to do that.”

Still, she admits, “it took a while to take that leap and actually ask for lessons”. When she finally plucked up the courage, her choice of tutor proved fortuitous. “He was a local DJ who was a friend of a friend, but I only met him when I asked him to teach me,” she remembers. “He started giving me lessons about seven years ago, and then he became my partner. We’re engaged now.”

At first, Jazzy didn’t devote herself solely to dance music. For several years, she was a member of Dublin hip-hop collective Powerful Creative Minds, who released their debut EP ‘#39’ in 2020. Because of her distinctive singing style, her bandmates gave her the stage name “Jazzy Yaz”, which she later shortened to Jazzy. “We did pretty well. Anytime we’d do a small concert or competition, we’d get local support. And the boys taught me a lot about writing songs,” she notes.

In 2021, Jazzy branched out by booking studio time with Belters Only, a local dance duo consisting of DJ-producers Conor Bissett and Robbie Griffiths. They’d known each other for a while, but Bisset has admitted he “never really knew [Jazzy] had a great voice” until they worked together. Their very first session yielded ‘Makes Me Feel Good’, a reworked version of Timmy Regisford and Lynn Lockamy’s house deep cut ‘At The Club’, which Belters Only initially put out themselves.

“Anyone I play in my DJ sets is someone I want to work with”

After the song popped off on TikTok, it was picked up by British record label Polydor [Sam Fender, Ellie Goulding] and given a major push. At the time, Jazzy was still working in her local branch of Tesco. “We made a music video pretty sharpish, so people would come in and say: ‘You’re the girl from that song,’” she recalls. When a label exec called her to say that ‘Make Me Feel Good’ had hit Number One in Ireland, Jazzy was busy making croissants in the Tesco bakery.

At this point, Polydor offered her a solo deal, an opportunity she seized in a characteristically level-headed way. “I remember talking it through with my mum,” she says. “And she was like, ‘The opportunity is there, you can’t let it pass. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out.’”

Although Jazzy was raised by her Irish mother and her father wasn’t present when she was growing up, she believes his Jamaican heritage is firmly infused in her music. “You can hear it when I sing, I sound quite soulful, and I think that comes quite naturally from that side of me,” she says. Her Irish side, she says, is represented by the warm organ house sound that underpins ‘Giving Me’. “All the local producers here love the organ. I think that song sounds very Dublin.”

After ‘Giving Me’ exploded, climbing to Number One in Ireland and Number Three in the UK, Jazzy’s life changed forever. Dublin is still home, but she now spends more time in London, where most of her recording sessions take place. Initially, navigating the sprawling British capital was a culture shock. “I remember walking into the tube and not knowing what to do,” she says with a slight cringe. “I was trying to ask for help, but everyone was too busy to stop. It just felt like a far cry from home.”

Though Jazzy was “quite shy” in the studio to begin with, she now feels more confident and often arrives with song ideas. She’s already been prolific, releasing three EPs, including February’s ‘High In The Moment’, a three-song reunion with Belters Only. Then in May, she scored her ninth UK chart hit with ‘Closer To The Floor’, a sultry team-up with French electronic musician Ankhoï.

Her new single ‘High On Me’ is the first taster from an upcoming DJ mix project due later this summer. After that, she’ll focus on making a debut album that she hopes will tell “a bigger story”. She’s also manifesting a collab with fellow female house maven Peggy Gou – “I just think we’re on the same page” – and learning to be a producer. “When you’re in the DJ world playing great house music, you’ve got to make it as well, don’t you?” she says with a glint of ambition.

She loves being “booked and busy” and knows exactly how this year should pan out: “Summer is for live work, winter is for cooking up bangers.” Practical but passionate: that feels quintessentially Jazzy.

Jazzy’s single with Rossi, ‘High On Me’, is out now.

Listen to Jazzy’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Nick Levine
Photography: Fiona Garden
Styling: Ellie Rimmer
Hair and Makeup: Gracie Jai Cox
Label: Chaos

The post Jazzy is always cooking up bangers appeared first on NME.