Today, I am speaking with Djo the musician, not Joe Keery the star of Stranger Things. This fact is reiterated to me several times both before and after our interview. Fair enough, perhaps: it’s tough to establish yourself in the music scene if you’re forever being tied to the lovable jock you once played in your twenties. It helps that music is no passing vanity project for Keery – and also that his psychedelic indie pop is playful, heartfelt and ambitious, ranging far beyond his viral hit, 2022’s “End of Beginning”, a bite of synth-pop deliciousness wrapped up in a nostalgia for Chicago.
In Keery’s mind, his two identities are not so separate. The impulse behind creating music and acting is “pretty similar”, the 33-year-old tells me via Zoom from the sofa of his New York City apartment. “There’s definitely a bit of me that is probably running away from the silence,” Keery goes on. “When my brain gets still and quiet and I have that moment of like, ‘I gotta do something!’ Part of that is probably to do with a fear of death, you know, running away from something.”
Music isn’t something he started on a whim. Keery already has three solo albums under his belt (four if you count the newly released deluxe version of The Crux, which we’re here to talk about) and a further three with the Chicago psych-rock group Post Animal – a band he joined in 2014, a full year before he landed his life-changing role on Stranger Things.
He has TikTok to thank for at least some of his success as a musician. Two years after its release, “End of Beginning” went viral on the platform, used by millions of people to soundtrack their wholesome travelogues and wistful meditations on childhood. That track rode the social media high all the way to No 4 in the UK charts, clocking over 1.5 billion streams in the process. “It was odd, but that’s the world we live in,” he says, having experienced the very online moment as someone very much offline.
While “End of Beginning” holds a special place in his heart, everything Keery has recorded since sounds like a musician trying to wriggle free of that viral 60-second soundbite. Even in the space of six years, his musical taste careens around from the lo-fi, fuzzy psychedelia of his debut album, Twenty Twenty (2019) to the digital synthy sheen of Decide (2022) and the Seventies-textured soft rock of The Crux. Not for nothing, the same sentiment applies to his acting career; it’s hard to think of a character more different to sweet Steve Harrington than the murderous rideshare driver Keery played in Spree or the power-hungry cowboy cop with daddy issues he embodied in Fargo.
This isn’t the first time Keery and I are speaking. Back in April, we chatted over matcha lattes about what was then the imminent release of his third album, the power-pop leaning The Crux. Moments later, my phone was stolen and with it the recording of our interview. The only remnants of our meet-up were my hastily written notes: “Nice guy from Boston; cool rings; baseball cap; shirt and tie.” Today over Zoom, the “nice guy” thing stands but he’s traded in the outfit for bedhead and a plain white tee.
Only a few months have passed and already Keery has followed The Crux up with a deluxe edition, comprising 12 new tracks that expand the universe of its predecessor. “I thought it was a cool way to give people a peek behind the curtain at the songs that didn’t make it,” says Keery. “It’s more for the fans.” The two are sonically and lyrically tied – recorded at the same time at the legendary Electric Lady Studios in New York.
The album is diverse in its tastes. Lead single “Mr Mountebank” is a synth-loaded meditation on identity and performance, anchored in Keery’s vocals Auto-Tuned to oblivion. “Carry The Name”, meanwhile, is a restrained guitar-led elegy. Like its namesake, this record wears its influences on its sleeve – Steely Dan, Tame Impala, Fleetwood Mac – albeit setting them in darker, moodier lighting. It’s the night-time drive to The Crux’s sunny road trip.
Recently, Keery has come around to life online – a little. “There’s a balance to be struck because it definitely doesn’t make you feel good,” he says. “It’s so easy to let it dominate your life and seep into everything you’re doing then all of a sudden you’re on your phone all the time.” Striking that balance is more tricky in an era when artists are expected to market themselves online all the time. “There is pressure because that’s the way things happen now, but I also think studios or labels or people trying to drum up that viral moment, they just want money,” he says, sounding vaguely disgusted at the prospect.
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“I’ve definitely missed out on acting stuff because I didn’t have Instagram,” Keery adds, noting that his team was urging him to make an account. “What am I going to do – post pictures of models and fashion shoot s***? When people want to take advantage of your followers, it’s just like this is so stupid. It felt like a real sell-out.” It wasn’t until his music started to take off that Keery felt there was a need for social media at all. True to his word, there is no fashion shoot s*** on his account. His approach is to be “as uncool” as possible. “Trying to be relevant or trying to be cool is like chasing your own tail.”
One reason Keery enjoys the music side of his career is the freedom it affords. The sort of freedom an actor seldom gets, certainly not one at the forefront of one of the biggest, most secretive shows in the world. “It’s nice to be your own boss,” he says. “And that is in no way disparaging Stranger Things at all. I look up to Matt and Ross [Duffer, the creators] in a way that I hope they understand because I’ve learnt so much from that whole process. But it’s nice to put your own little flag in the ground and shoulder the responsibility in dragging something over the line creatively.”
Songwriting is also cathartic. His early tracks like “Tentpole Shangrila” (2019) were tied up in that dizzying experience of new fame, but now, he says, “As it’s become a more naturalised part of my life, I’m a little less shocked by it.” His more recent releases traffic in themes more widely relatable: heartbreak, insecurity, authenticity, loneliness, nostalgia. And fans will almost certainly be zeroing in on the identity of the girl with a “gap-tooth smile” and “killer queen” style on The Crux. (His ex, the actor Maika Monroe, has a perfect set.)
What of his privacy? He is, after all, an artist who used to perform in wigs at gigs in a winking attempt at a little self-preservation. “I think the job is bearing it all – or you’ve got to try,” says Keery. “It’s less about being nervous over how everybody else will interpret the lyrics and more about decoding my own feelings in the process. That’s what’s hard.”
One question he’s still decoding: would the music have found its way, had his screen work not paved the path first? “I mean, how can you not think about that?” Keery says. “Absolutely I think about it, but I try to combat that in a bunch of different ways because you’ll never know the answer. Living that question too much is thinking about the past and I think it’s important to really live in the present.”
For better or worse, one chapter of his life is closing imminently with the final season of Stranger Things arriving in December. Keery is feeling “pumped” about people seeing the end, having recently watched one of the eight episodes for the first time. “It was a long shoot, lots of work, lots of waiting, lots of action stuff, and a lot of endings,” he says, “a lot of time spent being like, ‘Wow this is the last time we’re going to be doing all these different things.’ So yeah it was really loaded, the whole thing. But it ended perfectly for me. I was extremely satisfied.” As for signing up for another 10-year project, Keery, newly focused on his music, laughs. “Well, not tomorrow…”
‘The Crux Deluxe’ is out now via AWAL
