Jazzy: Riding the wave

There’s something magnetic about Jazzy. It’s not long after midday on a sweltering Sunday towards the end of the hottest summer the UK has ever experienced, and south London’s Burgess Park looks like a wasteland. It’s a few minutes until the Dublin-based DJ and singer born Yasmin Byrne is due on stage at the Eastern Electrics day festival, but all that can be seen from the main stage is a few topless and sunburnt festivalgoers laid down in the shade. From their demeanour, they’re about as drained as what used to be the park’s grass, which now takes the form of dust so arid that it looks and feels like sand. 

What happens next feels like something from a film. Whether it’s through the jubilant pop-house she starts to play, or the infectious grin she wears while doing it, thousands of ravers descend on the stage from nowhere, like zombies raised from their slumber, drawn in by Jazzy’s joyous centre of gravity. 

Cuts from her forthcoming debut album, Peace & Patience, are mixed in with high-profile, chart-topping collaborations with dance heavyweights Calvin Harris, Sonny Fodera and Rossi, as well as some Chic and Madonna for good measure. It’s a set that speaks to both discerning ears and the mainstream radio crowd, a balance that is taking her a long way. Ninety minutes later, she departs to a packed house as a certified party starter, and every tired body in the crowd is suddenly ready to carry on from the early afternoon till Monday morning. 

“I would’ve been fine playing to nobody – it’s 2pm, you know!” the DJ tells Rolling Stone UK with a smile as she skips off stage. Coming from anyone else, it would sound like false humility, but Jazzy has played plenty of gigs to nobody over the years, and that smile, energy and gratitude never once budged. 

Earlier that morning, we meet Jazzy for breakfast at a nearby hotel, the type of place that has increasingly become her natural habitat each summer. Even hearing her recite her schedule of late is enough to bring out a yawn: the weekend prior, she was in Glasgow supporting Calvin Harris at a stadium gig, before getting a few precious days at home in Dublin. It’s London now for the weekend, before she sets off for Budapest, Germany, Belgium, Creamfields and then Ibiza’s famous Pacha club, where she’s become a regular. One of the main reasons for choosing her new home in Dublin, she says with a straight face, was its proximity to the airport. 

Despite this, home is always where she’d rather be. Born and raised on an estate in the Crumlin district of the Irish capital, “family is top of the list” in Jazzy’s life, she says. “Right now, me life is absolute chaos, you know?” she laughs in her delightfully strong Dublin accent, “but the most important thing to me at the end of the day is getting home to make sure I can spend time with them and making sure they know I’m still here, even though I’m just gone all the time.” 

By Jazzy’s own admission, her Irish accent isn’t nearly as pronounced in her singing as it is in person (“I tell people to go back and listen again, because when you know, you do hear it”), and she has had a tendency to be a “closed book” in her public-facing career. With her debut album, she says she wanted to pull back the curtain to show the close-knit, community-focused family life that spawned this exuberant and captivating performer. “A lot of people are still learning about where I come from,” she says, not content to just be the faceless vocalist on that radio hit by a DJ you like. “It’s a big part of who I am.” 

The first voices you hear on Peace & Patience, then, are those of her nearest and dearest. Mic’d up at a local pub under the guise of just chatting away for a promo video, her family provide the album’s earnest and endearing intro. “To hear your own child on the radio, and all the stations are playing her song,” her mother says, beaming with a clear pride that bursts out of the speakers in the thickest Dublin accent you’ve ever heard. “She’s going to keep climbing and climbing.” 

“She’s just a good auntie for me,” her niece remarks, before the kicker that makes the whole room roar with approval: “She just makes good music for the world!” 

The love is then repaid the other way on ‘My People’, Jazzy’s irresistibly catchy ode to those who made her. “I feel joy, it’s all around me,” she sings over stabs of soaring house piano, affirming that with them is “where I wanna be”. 

“I couldn’t see myself living anywhere else,” she declares now. “I don’t think I’ll ever move out of Ireland, to be honest with you.” The benefits for her career might be tangible, but there’s a grounded nature to her, both in conversation and on stage, that is nourished by remaining at home. And besides, the airport is so close now. 

The story of Jazzy’s big break is well-worn. ‘Make Me Feel Good’, her 2021 collaboration with fellow Irish duo Belters Only, hit number one in Ireland in February 2022 (number four in the UK), when she was still working at her local Tesco. 

What makes the story unique, and so telling of Jazzy’s outlook on the world, is that she never painted it as a transformation from a miserable or unfulfilled life into becoming a superstar DJ. “I wasn’t sad in my life at all!” she confirms now. “I was happy as Larry working in Tesco.” By chance, she was in that very store with her partner a few days before we meet. “I was pointing at different stuff like, ‘Oh, I used to do this and I used to do that!’” she smiles. “I enjoyed it; it was a nice job. I had friends, and my manager was nice to me. It’s obviously lovely to be able to do this now, but at the same time, I had my health, I had a job, I didn’t have any major problems in my life. You have to be grateful for these things as well, you know? It could be worse,” she says with that signature grin. “Yeah, could be way worse…” 

Growing up singing in her bedroom and playing the violin, Jazzy then joined local hip-hop group Powerful Creative Minds (PCM), before a night out on her 18th birthday ignited her love of dance music. She became desperate to learn to DJ, so found her way through friends of friends to local DJ Ross Mooney, who taught her the skills that are now igniting dancefloors worldwide. He’s there to see it all too, as her tour manager and fiancée. 

With no knowledge of, or contacts within, the major music industry, it was only when an A&R from Polydor contacted her after the success of ‘Make Me Feel Good’ that the idea of Jazzy the artist came into focus (the name was given to her by her PCM bandmates, who christened her “Jazzy Yas”). 

“I remember pacing up and down for five minutes before he rang me,” she laughs. “I’d never experienced that, and I didn’t know anyone who’d had experiences like that. I was just going in blind!” Though she says she’s had to learn to be more industry-wise and to hold her own in often overwhelming studio sessions with strangers, this sense of wonder still fuels her and has led to BRIT and Ivor Novello Award nominations, collaborations with Calvin Harris (May’s single ‘Satisfy’), Sonny Fodera (ubiquitous 2024 smash ‘Somedays’) and slots at Coachella, Glastonbury and across Ibiza. 

In 2025, she became the most-streamed female DJ on the planet on Spotify, and the most popular female act from Ireland full stop on the platform, ahead of the likes of Sinéad O’Connor and Enya. 

Keeping her grounded throughout it all is Mooney, who learned on the job to be a tour manager so the pair could travel the world together. After the “really hard” period of time when she began touring heavily without him, documented on Peace & Patience track ‘Fantasy’, the pair have become an inseparable ball of energy as they bounce around the world together. 

Both Jazzy and Mooney carry the same humility and gratitude. A product of both their upbringings (“They keep your feet on the floor,” she says of those at home), they are open and gracious to a fault. “She hasn’t changed one bit since I met her,” Mooney tells me after the set in London, a sentiment echoed by all those surrounding the artist today and across the summer. So intent are the pair to not indulge in the diva stereotypes of successful touring artists, they often go too far the other way. Her fiancée relates how she recently asked him to make a perfectly reasonable request at a hotel where they were staying: “‘Do you think you could possibly call reception and ask if we could maybe get a late check-out?’” He laughs as he recounts that in the event they were both too shy to follow through, instead packing their bags and moving on. 

Jazzy admits she worries about having pulled Mooney away from his blossoming job as a mixologist to join her on tour. “It breaks my heart,” she says. 

In a move too sweet and earnest to be cynically planned, Jazzy begins playing ‘My People’, her song about the importance of family and community, to the now-fervent London crowd just as Mooney enters the booth. He’s brought her an ice cream with a flake, which she giddily chomps away at for the rest of the set whenever her hands are able to be off the mixers. 

Over breakfast, I ask Jazzy whether the infectious positivity that flows through her music and her DJ sets is one she’s deliberately tried to foreground, or simply just a representation of who she is as a person. “If you asked anyone about me, I am just generally quite a happy person,” she shrugs, maybe a little unaware of how vital such good energy is for the world in 2026. 

“If you came home [with me] and talked to my mam, you’d say that she’s the spitting image of me,” she adds with visible pride. A product of her environment, Jazzy is bringing the humility forged in Crumlin to some of the biggest stages in the world and onto a debut album that peels back the curtain on a fascinating and worthy new dance star. 

There’s also no fear about having to return to Tesco if necessary, giving her career a refreshing lack of do-or-die pressure. “Not putting that amount of pressure on myself keeps everything flowing the way it’s supposed to be,” she says. She’s seen others hang their hopes and happiness on succeeding in this industry, “and it can be such a train wreck. It puts you in this delusional mindset, and I don’t see any way of getting back from that.” 

Instead, she handles her career with a healthy nonchalance and appreciates the little things. She and Mooney are particularly excited to catch the London premiere of the Death Note anime musical on an upcoming day off, and she beams when discussing the idea of returning to Dublin to see her childhood best friend’s little kids. “It’s really hard to come by strong friends and family these days,” she admits. “I’m blessed, and just want them to know that.”

Taken from the October/November issue of Rolling Stone UK. Buy your copy here.