Irish DJ and producer Jazzy has a simple rule when it comes to her house-infused sound: if she wouldn’t play it in a club, it’s out. “I always want to have that clubby sound,” she tells Apple Music. “I always have that in mind when I’m making a song.” The musician—born Yasmine Byrne—enjoyed mainstream success in 2022 with “Make Me Feel Good”, a throbbing collaboration with Irish electronic collective Belters Only, and earlier this year with her enormous debut solo single, “Giving Me”, on which she sings about finding catharsis on the dance floor after “all the hurt and all the pain” of a toxic-sounding relationship. “I’ve had a couple of singles now, so I thought it was the right time to put together this mixtape and let people get to know me more,” she says. Jazzy named the mixtape Constellations partly because it contains a trance-flavoured banger called “Stardust”. Fully uptempo, the mixtape is a six-track love letter to the modern and old-school dance sounds that have shaped her. “I was very well-behaved as a child, so I didn’t actually go out until I was of age,” Jazzy says. “But then my friend who was really into dance music brought me out [clubbing] for my 18th birthday, and I just fell in love with it.” When, a couple of years later, Jazzy decided she wanted to learn to DJ, it changed her life both professionally and personally. “I had a couple of friends who knew how to DJ, but none of them would take me seriously,” she recalls with a laugh. “So I ended up asking one of their mutual friends who I didn’t know too well, and he said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’ That was five years ago!” Read on as Jazzy explains how she made Constellations shine, one track at a time. “Giving Me” “After I’d done a few tracks with Belters [Only], we realised we really loved working together and made our sessions more regular. This track started with the beat. Then when we started vibing, the chorus and everything else flowed from there. It started as just another day in the studio, but I knew I loved ‘Giving Me’ as soon as I made it. I think at this point in my creative journey I was really coming into my own and knew not to force anything. I’ve got used to hearing this song out and about now, but when [house DJ/producer] Sonny Fodera played it at his 3Arena gig in Dublin in April 2023, that was just an amazing moment for me.” “Feel It (Club Edit)” “I love what this track’s producers, Hannah Laing and D.O.D, are doing right now. They were looking for the right person to jump on ‘Feel It’, and as soon as I heard it, I knew it had to be me. It has quite a ’90s bounce to it, which I love. I play a lot of ’90s dance songs in my DJ sets, like ‘Dreamer’ by Livin’ Joy and ‘Son of a Gun’ by JX, so I love that sound and feel like this track really suits me.” “Empty Promises” (with Charlotte Plank) “I’m very open to working with different people, but you definitely vibe with some collaborators more than others. As an artist, you have to find your group of core people that you really like working with. I love working with [English singer-songwriter] Charlotte Plank, who features on this track. It started with the idea of ‘making promises’, but then ‘empty promises’ kind of flowed from there because that’s what can happen in a relationship. I guess this song is sort of a love story, but it’s not drawn from my own life. It’s just a story we built together in the studio.” “NRG” “Sometimes, if you’re busy, there’s no time to think about song ideas. But other times, something will come to me when I’m just relaxing at home. When that happens, I’ll record the idea on Voice Memos, then take it into a session to build from. My idea here was to write a song about the excitement of going out clubbing. The producer, Jacob Manson, suggested [tapping into] some classic acid sounds, which I was really into from the start. We built the song from the chorus out and turned it into an anthem for people who want to go out and live their best life.” “Stardust” “The title came first, but the overall story of this song is very much about clubbing again. The lyrics are open to interpretation, but there’s a little nod in there to things getting pretty wild on the dance floor. I don’t want to say too much, but imagine people losing all their clothes and stuff. ‘Stardust’ was produced by Karma Kid who wanted it to have an old-school feel—and, I have to say, he absolutely nailed it.” “Feeling Tonight” “I came into the studio with this idea of ‘feeling tonight’ and told [my collaborators] Jacob Manson and Kareen Lomax that I wanted to build a song around it. Lyrically, this track reminds me a little bit of ‘Giving Me’. It’s about being in a relationship that maybe isn’t going great, so you just want to go out and party and forget everything. There was a time when I’d go out to see DJs play every weekend, but I don’t have as much time to do that anymore. Champagne problems, I guess!”