‘It’s nice to be my own boss’

Singer-songwriter Djo, aka Joe Keery, is known for his acting role in 'Stranger Things', but his music is in the ascendant. He discusses juggling twin careers with

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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.