“I just want to tell you all that my first single went to No 1 in Ireland today and I want to buy you all a drink.”
Announcing her good news in a pub, a Tricolour draped around her shoulders, Jazzy flashed an awkward grin, hugged her friends, and raised a glass to the camera for the recording broadcast on YouTube.
That was in 2023, when her song Giving Me made her the first Irish female singer to top the Irish chart in more than 14 years. House-y, hopeful and expansive, Giving Me was the earworm that clubbers loved, Calvin Harris praised, and radio stations from Spin to RTÉ Radio 1 played.
As she sits in a brocaded chair in a private room in Dublin’s Dylan hotel, Jazzy – born Yasmine Byrne – admits now that the pub round wasn’t as spontaneous as it might have seemed. “My team definitely gave me a little pinch to do it,” she laughs. “It’s not easy to stand up in a pub.”
Jazzy might look the part of an international superstar – today she’s wearing black denim shorts and a tight black top with simple jewellery and dark-framed glasses – but she’s naturally humble and down to earth, and still coming to grips with her changed circumstances.
From working in the bakery section in Tesco in 2021, Jazzy spent this summer touring and supporting Harris, with whom she also released the single Satisfy. She was nominated for a Brit Award in 2024 and 2025, and a MOBO Award in 2026. In 2025, she became the most popular female DJ on Spotify with 10 million monthly listeners. She did a BBC Radio 1 residency and debuted at Coachella festival in the US. Later this month, she will release her first album Peace & Patience, and play the 3Arena on October 24th, her biggest headlining venue to date.
When we meet she’s barely off the plane from Ibiza – she was there to DJ in Pacha nightclub, making her one of the few people on the lively Dublin to Ibiza flight “trying to go to work” rather than party their nut off. “More than likely, someone’s getting arrested when they’re getting off the flight, that’s how crazy they are. They’d be screaming and singing.”
She’ll be back on a plane at the end of the month for another US tour. “I feel the love when I go over. Playing there, people are coming up asking for old Jazzy tracks. But it’s a huge place, so we have to keep going back and keep going back.”
She’s not stressed about her hectic schedule – “In music if you put too much pressure on yourself, you’re not going to get what you’re supposed to be getting naturally out of it” – but she does have a case of impostor syndrome.
Jazzy: Her debut album Peace & Patience is out on October 23rd
“I see all these things I’ve done and all these statistics about me, and then sometimes I’ll still be like, ‘You’re sh …’” She whispers a word.
I lean in. “Shy?” I suggest. She starts laughing. “Shite!” she whispers. “Sorry! No, I’m not over it [impostor syndrome]. It’s something that comes in waves. I think it’s because I’m honest as well. The humble side of me is struggling to be in the spotlight.”
Yasmine Byrne was raised by her single mother, Catherine, on a council estate in Crumlin, with her brother Ian and sister Tasha. Her father is black and her mother white – her father, she says, “was never in the picture”. Her mother noticed early on that her daughter was musical: Yasmine was bopping her head in time to music while in the buggy. “She had CDs on all the time and it was a complete mix,” Jazzy says of her mother. “She loved Joe Dolan. She loved Dolly Parton. She loved Creedence Clearwater Revival. And she loved clubland music.”
In third class, Yasmine was enrolled in a music programme that had started at St Agnes’ Primary School on Armagh Road, created by Joanna Crooks, former general manager of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland, and Sr Bernadette Sweeney, then principal of the school. The initiative offered free music lessons and instruments for pupils. When Yasmine took up the violin, the pair soon noticed her abilities.
When I phone St Agnes’ Primary School to ask if they remember their former student, Sr Bernadette returns my call immediately. “Jazzy blew people away by her playing because she was so understated. She’s a beautiful violinist, deeply musical. She wasn’t all about herself, and when you’re not all about yourself, your soul speaks through the music. She started with nothing, no music, no nothing, and worked all the way up.
“All the children know Jazzy. She inspired so many here. I go into shops and people say, ‘Is Jazzy one of yours?’”
‘I realised that what I wanted to be was behind the decks. It’s part of my evolution’
Because Yasmine lived a little far from the school, frequently one of the teachers would pick her up, ferrying her back and forth. She was one of 20 in the class.
“We all had a square patch of carpet to stand on,” Jazzy recalls. “Your violin would be there and you’d pick it up and the violin teacher, Pauline, she’d come around the class and scout people who were holding the violin well or bowing nicely. If she thought you were doing well, she’d pull you aside and say, ‘Would you like to join the orchestra? You can come after school and then you can practise more.’ So that’s what happened. She asked me.”
At home, she would sing “to the four walls”. She loved Fugees and 1990s R&B. She’d try out her vocals covering Lauryn Hill’s Killing Me Softly. But she was hesitant about singing in public. When a teacher announced they were creating a choir, “I had to be pushed,” she says. “Physically. My friend said, ‘Go up, you have to audition.’ She pushed me to go up and sing and then I was singing ever since that.” She got more comfortable, singing solos, developing her sense of pitch and melody.
After taking her grade eight exams for violin, she planned to become a music teacher: she left education at 16 and was working in the school as an assistant violin teacher. But another genre of music was creeping into her life: house music. After nights out at Sin on Sycamore Street in Temple Bar, and dancing to DJ gigs headlined by Amine Edge & DANCE, a French house duo, she asked a friend of a friend if he might teach her to DJ. That friend, Ross Mooney, became her boyfriend, and then her fiance.
She started recording and releasing music with the hip-hop group Powerful Creative Minds. About the same time, Sr Bernadette went around the local shops and asked if they’d give Jazzy a job. “I remember going to one of the supermarkets and saying, ‘I would be delighted if you could give Jazzy a job to keep her going. She’s no Mickey Mouse, no ordinary girl coming for a job, she’s very talented.’ So they gave her the job.”
At Tesco, Jazzy was able to fit recording sessions in around work and help out financially at home. Then Mooney introduced her to Conor Bissett and Robbie Griffiths from Belters Only, and they wrote the song Make Me Feel Good together in the studio. “After I met the Belters boys, it all started to kick off,” she says.
Jazzy plays Dublin’s 3Arena on Saturday, October 24th
When Belters Only released Make Me Feel Good featuring Jazzy’s vocals in late 2021, it went on to top the Irish singles chart in 2022 and became a hit in Britain. It now has 132 million streams on Spotify.
The song was a crunch point. It was now or never. She went home and told her mother Catherine that she was thinking of leaving work. “I sat down and said, ‘What do you think I should do? Will you help me out?’ She gave me the push. My ma was always really confident in me.”
It wasn’t an easy call. “After Tesco, there was a period where I was like, I’m not getting that many gigs. I did have to get another job in a pharmacy for a while.” After her record label Polydor found out, “they were really good”, she says. “I was only there for three weeks and they found out and stepped in and made sure that I had the funds to be able go and do sessions, and everything else I needed.”
When her first single Giving Me, hit the No 1 spot in the charts in 2023, “Calvin Harris messaged me on Instagram telling me how much he loved the song,” she says. “It started everything for me.”
Her debut album may seem like it’s been a long time coming – the word Patience isn’t in the title for nothing – but getting it right is important to her.
“I don’t want to be looking back and saying, ‘I wish I’d changed that.’ Some of the tracks were started two years ago so it’s been quite a journey. I like being in the studio as much as I can. I’m mostly in a studio in London with Mark Ralph, who produces all my vocals.” Musically the record is a throwback, a closer cousin of Robin S’s Show Me Love than Dua Lipa. “I like that,” she says. “I don’t want to fit in with everything else.”
She knew early on in the making of the record that she wanted to shout out to her community in Crumlin who had supported her. “I wanted to involve them,” she says. But it took her a while to figure out how to bring them on to the record in a way that made sense musically.
Eventually she asked her family and friends to come to a pub, The Stoneboat on Sundrive Road in Kimmage, to talk on the microphone and be filmed. “We had the top room, a little function room,” she says. “When you’re not used to it, a camera can be intimidating, or a microphone. We wanted it to feel as natural and relaxed as possible.” Her friends did an interview together. “And the lads that I used to be in a band with.”
The result is one of the most joyful moments on the album – a spoken word-led introduction of about a minute long that gathers together affectionate sentiments from her friends, her family, even her six-year-old niece Savannah. “To hear your own child on the radio and all the stations are playing her songs,” her mother says. “She’s auntie,” says Savannah. “She makes good music for the world.”
Reggie, the Nigeria-born, Dundalk-raised rapper who had a career-changing moment in 2025 when producer Fred Again remixed his song Talk of the Town, also guests on the song Elevate. “He’s popping off at the moment,” Jazzy says. “I reached out because he’s smashing it. I knew I wanted to have a rap verse on the song and it was just trying to find the right one. To have another Irish artist was great. I had done a few different ones with a couple of rappers from the UK, but Reggie’s was the standout.”
Soulful, uplifting and as easy to vacuum around the house to as to dance to in a club, Peace & Patience is a record that doubles as an endorphin boost. Her fans often tell Jazzy that her music has helped them through hard times. “I’m quite a happy person so I think when I go into the studio, that’s what comes out,” she says. “I’m happy naturally. Ma always taught us to be kind growing up. I think that is just put into me.”
She has experienced racism as she has become more successful, but she tries not to react to it.
Jazzy: ‘I’m quite a happy person so I think when I go into the studio, that’s what comes out. I’m happy naturally’
“If I’m being highlighted as a certain thing, and the statistic has the word ‘Irish’ in it, sometimes that will pee off the racist people,” she says. “I love chatting to people that like my music, taking pictures, I’d do it all day. But there is the other side to social media. Nasty comments. I’ve figured out not to always go into the comment section. Friends see things and they’d be jumping in to defend me. Some people would be online, pointing out that I’m mixed race. But I choose not to engage.”
Her circle outside of music is small. When we meet she’s about to celebrate her 30th birthday, but she has no intention of doing much beyond a casual night out. “It’s just been so chaotic that I want to have a chill one,” she says. The same is true of her wedding plans. “I don’t think I’m going to have a big wedding. I wouldn’t have the numbers.”
She was surprised the day Mooney – who is also her tour manager – proposed, on a trip to Nara Park in Japan last December. But she did know it was coming – the couple have been together eight years and he had given her a promise ring the year before. “I’d be lost without him,” she says. “He lifts me up.”
The pair try hard to give back to their community. Last Christmas, Jazzy popped up on The Late Late Show to surprise a superfan called Dory, aged eight from Tallaght, who had shared a story about Jazzy driving past her car. Jazzy and Mooney also turned up to watch the children of Francis Street School perform their Christmas play two years ago. “Ross used to go there, so one of the teachers texted and said, ‘Is there any chance Jazzy would be around?’” she says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, go on.’ The children dressed up as us. It was really funny.”
Superfan Dory Hudson (8) from Tallaght with Jazzy and host Patrick Kielty on the set of The Late Late Toy Show last Christmas. Photograph: Andres Poveda/RTÉ
The couple have bought a house on the northside, not too far from her mother’s house, where Jazzy’s sister Tasha and her niece also live. “We got the house a little while ago, so we’re trying to finish that, and then we’ll move on to wedding plans,” she says. Is it a doer-upper? “There’s not much to be done at all,” she says. “Thank God, because we wouldn’t be able for a fixer-upper. It’s going slowly because we’re on the road so much, but we’re hoping at Christmas time to put more time into it. It’s great to even have the house bought.”
Touring is the focus for now – and she has learned ways to cut down on some of the more stressful elements. When she started out, she would sing live. Now she focuses solely on DJing. “After trying the whole performance – singing, DJing, and dancers – a couple of summers ago, I realised that what I wanted to be was behind the decks,” she says. “It’s part of my evolution.” It makes sense for an artist who seems shyer than your average pop star. If she’s lying awake worrying about something now, “It’d probably be missing my alarm clock,” she laughs. “If I’m going to sleep late and I have to be up early I probably just won’t go to sleep.”
The travel can be “hard and tiring”, particularly on those Dublin to Ibiza flights. But Jazzy rolls with it. She’s grateful. “It’s a champagne problem,” she says, with a smile.
Jazzy’s debut album Peace & Patience is out on October 23rd. She will play Dublin’s 3Arena on October 24th.