On a recent trip to Australia, Joe Keery made a decision. After performing at a festival under his musical moniker Djo – the side-project-turned-co-main-gig alongside his acting career – he took a few days off with his friends for a bit of R&R. “My friend Ted, any moment there was something beautiful, he would say, ‘Must appreciate’. So we’d be looking at a beautiful view, and be like, ‘Wow, must appreciate.’”
Though it started as the kind of inside joke that eventually becomes the soundtrack to a sun-soaked group holiday, that random punch-in used to permeate the silence became a bit of a new life mantra. “It’s important to do that for a bunch of different things, to just learn how to be happy and present in the moment,” Keery tells NME at his record label’s office in London, surrounded by soon-to-be signed vinyl copies of his third album, ‘The Crux’.
“But it’s hard when your brain is constantly thinking, ‘What about the future?’ and ‘What about the past?’. It’s the human struggle – basically ‘What does it mean to be content?’” These are the big questions Keery would find himself litigating at night when he was trying to fall asleep. He did turn 30 while he was writing ‘The Crux’, after all, which probably goes some way to explain the sudden existential spiral.
By his own admission, Keery has now become “obsessed” with living in the moment. He treats it like a little task, something he can tinker away at in off moments – in much the same way he’s treated his musical side gig for the past few years. “I’m addicted to doing projects,” he says with excitement.
Djo started out as just that – a project. For 2019’s ‘Twenty Twenty’ and 2022’s ‘Decide’, he would spend his nights building songs on his computer, funnelling his love for eclectic synth-pop acts like Daft Punk and Tame Impala into his own kind of creative expression.
“Having this kind of boiling throughout the whole thing… It’s been nice to have something else to work on,” he says about his music career simmering beneath the run of Stranger Things. “What I did was an extremely unique experience, even in the acting world. People don’t work on things for that long. Can you imagine how sad and weird I’d feel if I was just at home doing nothing? That would be bad for me.”
When it came to releasing those albums, he did so under a creative pseudo-disguise to help him fly under the radar. He wore an orange wig to cover arguably his most famous attribute, the mane of tousled Steve Harrington hair that birthed a million fan edits, and called himself Djo, a phonetic jumble of his own name. That security of semi-anonymity came crashing down when ‘End of Beginning’, an ode to Keery’s time in Chicago from ‘Decide’, turned into the soundtrack of nostalgia for hundreds of thousands of people on TikTok.
“You don’t make people forget you are in ‘Stranger Things’, but you do want to have a life outside of it”
“I’ve had a couple people ask, ‘Do you love nostalgia?’ And it’s like, not really,” Keery laughs. The irony of becoming the poster child for looking to the past when he’s on a carpe diem kick isn’t lost on him. “I’m not trying to live in the past. I have new memories that I’m linking to [Chicago]. I’m not 27 anymore. That’s a part of me, maybe, but not the whole part.”
When ‘End of Beginning’ blew up, so did Keery’s incognito persona. Now, he’s abandoned the wig and the costume, performing as himself to ballooning crowds. Part of that is necessity – the jig is up, after all – but it’s also a conscious decision on Keery’s part to make authenticity the focus of ‘The Crux’. “It felt like [the disguise] went against the core of what this process has been all about, which is trying to strip away things that are interfering with being honest.”
Though Keery isn’t interested in living in the past, he does see it as ripe for the picking when it comes to inspiration. He describes ‘The Crux’, like the albums before it, as a musical diary, and can pinpoint the exact places he was when he started writing certain songs. It chronicles the frenzied fever of his late twenties and early thirties, which is already primed for excavation.
Between the relatable woes of moving cities, long-term break-ups and feeling like you’re not quite young but not quite old, Keery had to reconcile wrapping up Stranger Things, his steady job for the last decade and facing the great unknown. “It’s the exact same feeling you have when you graduate from college, where you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t wait for this shit to be over’, and then the second that you graduate, you’re like, ‘Oh my god. I had it so good’,” Keery says.
A chunk of the songs from ‘The Crux’ were written while Keery was hunkered down in the frigid depths of Calgary shooting the fifth season of Fargo, his first major TV role outside of Stranger Things. It’s about as unrecognisable a role you can get from Hawkins’ heartthrob with a heart of gold, and not just because he bulked up and had to slick his hair down to his skull the whole time.
“I’ve had that security blanket in my life for the past 10 years, and now it’s a little bit of a new frontier for me.”
“You don’t make people forget you are in Stranger Things, but you do want to have a life outside of it,” he says. “It’ll be a part of my decision-making for doing things.” He channeled that tug of war into ‘The Crux’, which is more stripped-back than his previous offerings. Part of that was to do with the scale of production, as Keery was able to swap building songs in his bedroom for the storied Electric Lady Studios in New York.
“You’re not focused on chasing your own tail,” Keery says about how that scope altered his approach to making music. No longer limited by sounds he could punch into a laptop, he was able to spend two years recording snippets of ideas on whatever piano or guitar he had handy before testing their capacity in studios trodden by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and The Strokes.
But part of it was a shift in intention. Keery has always been an astute lyricist with a skill for tangible and introspective reflections about his own feelings. It’s part of the reason ‘End of Beginning’, a song very specific to Keery’s own experience, is also ineffably relatable. But where his previous records buried these observations under layers of cacophonous synth production, in ‘The Crux’, they have nowhere to hide.
Searing songs about heartbreak, loneliness and the fragility of feeling like you’ve got it all figured out sit alongside cheeky observations on familial dynamics and friendships in the age of social media. They create an instant snapshot of the second coming-of-age that follows your roaring twenties – but also a sense that the album welcomes a new phase of life for Keery, one that he’s approaching with optimistic confidence.
He’s no longer tethered to Stranger Things, having wrapped the series in December. “I don’t know anything. They don’t tell me anything,” he says instinctively when NME asks if he’s looking forward to a secret-free life, at least where demogorgons are concerned. “I mean, I know how the show ends, and I know what happens to everyone. So actually, I know everything.” He’s also ripped off the wig and is pursuing acting roles that centre the kind of creative fulfillment that makes him tick.
“Right now, in my life, I love it,” Keery says about the blank slate in front of him. “I’ve had that security blanket in my life for the past 10 years, and now it’s a little bit of a new frontier for me. The fact that anything could happen is really exciting. I’m really feeling positive and thankful.” In other words, must appreciate.
Djo’s third album ‘The Crux’ comes out April 4 via AWAL.