On Saturday night in Dublin, a thirty-year-old woman named Yasmine Byrne will step onto the biggest stage of her career, in front of a home crowd, and play songs that have already travelled further than most artists could dream of. Under the name Jazzy, she has been streamed more than a billion times, drawn a monthly audience of over ten million listeners, and worked with names as large as Calvin Harris. Yet the record she is celebrating, Peace and Patience, is her first full-length album, arriving after more than five years of releasing singles and smaller projects. The timing is, in its way, a quiet act of defiance.

Dance music has never been more popular with the young: Spotify has said that listening among under-25s has grown by more than 73% globally since 2020, and this summer the genre filled festival line-ups, including a Radio 1 Big Weekend night given over entirely to it. But the format that rewards patience, the album, has often been abandoned in favour of singles and EPs, built to be shared rather than lived with. Jazzy has noticed the shift, observing that people seem to be siding with virality over the quality of the music itself, and she insists she did not think about going viral while she was writing. Her scepticism has roots in the physical places where she learned her craft.

She began in Dublin's club scene as part of a collective called Powerful Creative Minds, and she remembers a city with far more nightclubs to go to than exist today. As venues continue to close, she worries that young artists will find fewer rooms in which to fail, improve and be heard by real people. The internet, she concedes, is a perfectly good home for dance music.