"I kind of do this selfishly, just for myself."
Joe Keery's craft comes from an insular place. Once best known for his role as the charming Steve "The Hair" Harrington on Stranger Things, his exploding music career as Djo has benefitted from him tapping into genuine expression rather than strategy.
"I'm just interested in making songs and working with my friends, and it's a really fun process for me and very cathartic for just working on things in my own life. So, it is very selfish," he tells Exclaim! by phone from Chicago. It's the same place he became synonymous with after an unexpected TikTok smash, which connected the dots for many that Djo and Harrington are the same guy. Now, anyone familiar with him associates him with "End of Beginning" — which was inescapable for much of last year.
All of Djo's social media accounts are management-run, so he had to be told when the sleeper hit from 2022's DECIDE started soaring in February of 2024. It's easy to get the idea that he might feel removed from its success sans doomscrolling, but he's been "honoured" enough to see its impact in the real world.
"We started playing the song live, and it's pretty amazing to sing a song and have people sing it back to you," he says. "That's kind of a unique experience on that scale for me. So it feels a lot more real than when it was just kind of, like, numbers on a screen or something like that. But the song has taken on a life outside of the life that I gave it, and that's kind of the biggest compliment that you can get as a songwriter, I think: people connecting to something and making it their own."
"End of Beginning" resonates because it taps into a feeling anyone past a certain juncture in their life can pinpoint. It transcends the minutiae by looking into the not-so-distant past, when you realize that life's precious moments are fleeting, and your perceived invincibility is gone. Sure, it's about being 24 in Chicago, but fits seamlessly in any other age and place. The Beaches covered it for Triple J's Like a Version, changing the chorus to "When I'm back in Toronto, I feel it," and Keery finds it "really cool" that they put their own spin on it, considering what the song's popularity has taught him about his writing.
"It was definitely a lesson in specificity being kind of a powerful thing. The more specific I am about my own life, that allows people to kind of have a window into theirs," he considers.
That ethos has followed him through to his third album, The Crux, out April 4 via AWAL, where he expands on this assuredness of itself, channeling his experiences through its sunny melodies and instrumentation.
Harnessing these personal vignettes has led Djo to a more classic form of writing music, making '60s and '70s pop his compass while still being in tune with the psychedelic take on new wave he's best known for. In part, this came from starting and ending the project in a studio — something he'd never done before. He had previously used studio control rooms as a "finishing tool" when crafting 2019's Twenty Twenty and 2022's DECIDE, but working on The Crux at Electric Lady Studios gave him an opportunity to change his approach.
"I was a little bit more focused on trying to capture the initial idea, or the first few takes of an idea, and sort of getting that early so that you're not just trying to remake an idea, which is what I found myself doing a lot on the last thing," he says.
The album's warm glow sits in opposition to a few of its tracks being recorded during a Calgary winter; Keery spent six months in Canada while filming Fargo Season 5, in which he played Gator Tillman. He spent a lot of time "harvesting songs" while listening to "warm acoustic music" like Nick Drake and Fleetwood Mac, which seeped its way into his process of using analogue instruments to find what was at the heart of each track.
Fargo itself didn't influence how The Crux turned out, but it was a welcome distraction when he wasn't on set. When asked if his roles ever bleed into his music, Keery thinks before saying the only connection is that he's sometimes working on both at the same time. However, he recognizes the overlap between his crafts: "I'm just one big echo chamber. So everything is kind of affected by everything else, but they're a nice pair to both be working on simultaneously, I've found."
Even though he was best known as an actor until last year, Keery's musical roots run deep. Before he was Djo, he played in the psych band Post Animal before leaving in 2019 due to scheduling conflicts — and so his Stranger Things role wouldn't overshadow the rest of the project. It's not lost on him that these two sides of himself are linked for most people, but he tries not to let it faze him.
This only brings out what's already there for most artists: an itch to be taken seriously, and even then, he's at peace with the fact he can't control whether or not that happens. What he can do is make music that he's proud of, and he insists that he feels this way "more so than ever" with The Crux: "You can't guess what people's reaction will be, but I think if somebody can find a bit of themselves in it, then mission accomplished."
One of Stranger Things' strengths is its use of music to get to the show's emotional depths, so it's only natural that so many of its cast members have gone on to have successful music careers. Alongside Djo, Maya Hawke and Finn Wolfhard (with Calpurnia) have each graced the cover of Exclaim! with their musical side quests. That's far from a complete list; most of the Stranger Things kids have dabbled in music, including Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo and Charlie Heaton — the last of whom gets a few name drops on The Crux.
"Yeah, he's my friend," Keery says of Heaton, who inspired the Beach Boys-esque "Charlie's Garden," as well as his promise to "team up with Charlie" on the single "Delete Ya." Like most other scenes in Djo's lyrics, he doesn't try to parse why he's moved to write about something — that would just bog down the process. Even so, it's impossible to ignore how his personal relationships influence everything he does, and many of those bonds just so happen to form on set.
The fluid camaraderie between these music-loving castmates is thanks to a friends-first, coworkers-second relationship. Like any set of pals, they'll share a loose idea while messing around on guitar, or offer to lend a hand on each other's projects. The lush production heard in Djo's music proves his fascination with fidelity, so it makes sense that he brought his chops to help mix Wolfhard's 2020 single "Smoke Bomb" with the Aubreys. Though, if you ask him, he only added to what was already there.
"I don't think I imparted any of that on him," he says of Wolfhard's ear for production. "He's a super intelligent, exploratory songwriter; a guy who's really interested in getting into the weeds on things, and interested in process and forming the product. I know that his new record he did entirely on 4-track [recorders]. So, I think on his own behalf, he's kind of already that way."
He might not be giving himself enough credit, since Wolfhard describes Keery as his "bigger brother mentor."
"I really looked up to him, and I still do," Wolfhard tells Exclaim! "I wouldn't be releasing this record [the upcoming solo album Happy Birthday], or releasing the music that I have released in the past, if it wasn't for Joe's influence on me. Last year, when his song went big, I felt so vindicated. I was like, 'Yes, everyone now knows Joe — obviously not just as an actor, but as a musician, because he's a great songwriter.'"
A host of people are scattered in front of a hotel on the cover of The Crux. Nosy onlookers watch as Keery climbs out a second-floor window. A businessman basks in the sun while a burglar crawls out of the sewer beside him. A balding man sits in the passenger seat of a red convertible as someone holding a Big Gulp gestures at the photographer. Above the scene, an airplane tows a banner reading, "I'm sorry Cindy and I love you." That's only the surface of what's going on, and, purposely or not, it's an allegory for the album's storytelling, which calls on true stories of not only friendship, but also love, loss and sticky, flash-in-the-pan moments.
It all sounds pretty romantic, and for the most part, it is. As Keery sings on the title track, "There's a crux to everything," and that notion is carried by the record's lead single. Borrowing from DECIDE-era techniques, "Basic Being Basic" leans into bouncing synths and funk-informed vocals to take a salty stab at someone shallow. He says that the song came from a direct "place of spite," and the shade it casts on an album that, even when blue, is approached with earnestness. "I'm a guy who likes to sit pretty positive, but I think it's also important to show that side," he says.
Maybe that's why the only bitterness hinted at in these songs sits at surface level. "Basic Being Basic" could be about someone vacuous in the classic sense, or it could be about someone desperately fighting their normie tendencies with a mysterious, pretentious act. Both are sides of the same coin, and while he thinks it's up to the listener to interpret it themselves, he has his own idea of what "basic" means: "Trying to be anything other than the voice that's trying to get you to be anything other than yourself, trying to convince you that you are not enough, I guess, and letting that voice get the best of you." Like all of The Crux, it's about making light of whatever's thrown Keery's way, whether it's currently in front of him or if it pops up from the past.
After nearly a decade, Stranger Things is wrapping up. Filming for the show's fifth and final season ended in December, and it's due to drop sometime later this year; he's also waiting on the wide release of Pavements, a film he calls an "experimental homage to a band" in which he plays Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus. This post-production limbo period has given Djo time to write music and work — as he puts it, "There ain't no rest for the wicked."
He'll tune in to Stranger Things when it comes out, but since the end of the show is something he's already experienced, he's ready to move onto the next thing.
Where a film project can last for months before he finally sees himself on screen, an idea can become a fully fledged song in about a day. It doesn't mean he prefers one craft over another — in fact, he appreciates the balance he gets from doing both, on top of his other hobbies like running, tennis, cooking, and a few different artistic endeavours he keeps to himself. All of these are guests at The Crux hotel, where anything in Keery's life is fair game as long as the feeling sticks. And for him, these things don't always have to be about the bigger picture, since he's "just kind of looking forward and grateful for the past and excited for the future."
Using his own life to let others see themselves brought Djo success, and while he'll carry that lesson with him, he won't use it as a tactic down the line.
"I'm somebody who doesn't try to think too macro about my own career," he reflects. "It's just unpredictable, and there's no way to have any sort of control, so you're kind of just wasting your time."