Jazzy

With an unfussy, smoky vocal timbre, Irish singer Jazzy evokes a strain of house music that emerged well before her lifetime. The approach has paid off handsomely, yielding multiple major successes in the U.K. and her native Ireland both as a featured vocalist on Belters Only’s “Make Me Feel Good” and as a confident solo artist on “Giving Me,” “Feel It,” and “Somedays.”

Born Yasmin Byrne in 1996 and raised in Dublin’s Crumlin suburb as one of three children to a single mother and a Jamaican father with whom she maintains no contact, she nonetheless immersed herself in music early despite the constraints of council-estate life. School violin lessons sparked her interest, leading to a deep appreciation for ’90s R&B from Lauryn Hill through Mariah Carey alongside the driving pulse of house and techno.

After mastering DJ techniques and production skills, she recorded seriously under the moniker Jazzy Yaz as rapper and singer in the Irish hip-hop collective Powerful Creative Minds. Two EPs with the group—2020’s #39 and 2021’s Am I Wasting Time—plus singles such as the reflective “Hope Is Good, Change Is Real” preceded her decision to branch out independently. Introduced by her boyfriend to Irish DJs Bissett and Robbie G, she joined them in Belters Only. Their first release, the 2021 single “Make Me Feel Good,” reworked house pioneer Timmy Regisford’s 2011 cut “At the Club” and arrived just as COVID restrictions began lifting. Issued while Jazzy still stocked shelves at a Tesco supermarket, the track reached number four on the U.K. charts and topped Ireland’s, marking the first time an Irish dance act had done so in more than twenty years.

Following another U.K. Top 20 entry with Belters Only—“Don’t Stop Just Yet,” itself a reinterpretation of Morcheeba’s “World Looking In”—Jazzy issued her debut solo EP, Constellations, in 2023. The Belters Only-produced “Giving Me,” which highlighted her vocal range, climbed to number three in the U.K. and again number one in Ireland, the first such achievement for an Irish woman since Julie-Anne Dineen’s 2009 cancer-charity single “Do You Believe?” A year later she returned with the EP No Bad Vibes (2024), led by the U.K. and Irish Top Five hit “Somedays,” a collaboration with Australian producer Sonny Fodera and British DJ D.O.D.