‘I've been incredibly lucky. I have heavy imposter syndrome': Djo on viral fame, bad reviews, and life after Stranger Things

The Guardian

21 hours ago

'It was a crazy situation – this song that I wrote was being linked to the head of the Catholic church!' Joe Keery sounds incredulous as he recalls his latest viral moment. The track in question was End of Beginning, the wistful indie anthem from his 2022 album Decide. It first became an online hit last year, taking on a new life soundtracking TikTok users' videos of their home towns. As it happens, the home town – or university town, in Keery's case – that he sings about in the song is Chicago. Fast forward to this May, when Illinois native Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the new pope. The song began to do the rounds all over, with fans overlaying the lyrics ('And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it!') over videos of the new pontiff.
It was just the latest surreal chapter in the 33-year-old's career, which has seen him juggle musical success with acting megastardom, thanks to his breakout role as villainous jock, and later beloved fan favourite, Steve Harrington in Netflix's retro sci-fi smash Stranger Things. Performing under the name Djo, he has released two albums of hazy psychedelic rock and angular electro respectively, plus that aforementioned, absolutely inescapable viral hit, which peaked at No 4 in the UK charts. He's now on tour in support of recent third album The Crux, aptly named as he reaches the end of a nine-year stint in Stranger Things, whose extremely long-awaited final season will be released on 26 November.
'It's about the journey to reconnect with your roots and your family and your friends, and to rediscover what your real priorities are,' Keery says. It could sound trite, but it does seem like this is exactly what he's done – even bringing his pre-Stranger Things band Post Animal on tour with him (he rejoined the group earlier this year).
We meet at a shabby-chic north London pub, with Keery two shows into a three-night run at the nearby O2 Forum. Looking very much 'incognito musician', he wears a paint-splattered grey shirt, striped white barrel jeans and snakeskin-effect black cowboy boots, with hair that toes the line between artfully lived-in and a little greasy, and slim, rectangular sunglasses. Although he is a New Yorker these days, he was born and raised in Massachusetts and sports a Boston Red Sox cap. Initially, he seems a little guarded (the glasses stay on for 10 minutes or so), but that slowly seeps away and a playful, thoughtful music nerd emerges – the same Keery who recently appeared on the YouTube 'name that tune' series Track Star* waxing lyrical about Bryan Ferry and the Cars. He instantly recognises the face on my T-shirt as a young Billy Joel, and you get the sense that he'd happily just talk about Joel for the next hour.
There's a temptation – and maybe rightly so – to see actors turned musicians as hedging their bets, but it's clear that Keery really cares about music, and has a talent for it to boot. He hails from a 'creative family' (teacher mum, architect dad) and grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, ELO, Sheryl Crow, Shania Twain, Alison Krauss – the list goes on. While his last album, Decide, bore many of the hallmarks of his favourite electronic artists (hi Justice!), The Crux leans more heavily on those earlier influences, for a sound that Keery describes as 'far more organic'.
Keery is the second oldest of five children, the rest all girls, and it was Caroline – two years older than him – who pushed him to pursue acting. The first person in his family to leave the state for university (not for any good reason, he says, but because he didn't get good enough grades to go to UMass in Amherst), he landed at drama school in Chicago, and fell in love with the city ('Working-class town, great art scene, affordable … absolutely ungodly weather that will test you all year, but then the most glorious summer'). After studying there, he stayed in the city and played guitar and keys with Post Animal, whose style was (and remains) psychedelic, flecked with prog and classic rock. He recalls the band's early days, playing at events such as Austin Psych Fest as 'a cool bonding experience. You're kind of cutting your teeth doing that stuff, you're having your highs and lows together. Sometimes it sucks and you bomb. It's fun to have those experiences, though, to look back on.'
Stranger Things came a couple of years into Post Animal's existence and was a huge coup for Kerry, who to that point had only had small roles in procedural dramas such as Chicago Fire. Still, he has often talked about the 'big-time Fomo' he felt when he had to leave Chicago for Atlanta, where the Netflix series was filmed. 'What an opportunity … I got plucked out of obscurity and put into this thing that thrust me into the public eye,' he says. 'But then, immediately, I was met with a sense of … oh man! I miss my friends and my sense of community. It took me a few years, honestly, to grapple with that.'
Keery had to stop touring with Post Animal, and ultimately leave the band altogether, due to his Stranger Things commitments, but he still made music during filming, in part to keep himself busy and away from potential vices. ('It's like, four in the afternoon. I'm not gonna go to the bar! That can be dangerous.') Now he's enjoying bringing his acting friends into his music (his Stranger Things co-star Charlie Heaton features on the new record), while also linking up again with his old bandmates. Even so, he's the first to admit that it's quite an unusual situation, and one clearly bolstered by his own existing status: his first appearance with Post Animal, after rejoining them, was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Finding their feet on such a high-profile platform has led to 'a level of stress. But it's also good, I think, to release that and be like, well, it's not gonna be perfect. I'm figuring it out, too.'
Although he is now – once again – part of a group, Keery is also very much a solo artist as Djo. In a 2020 interview, he said that his stage name (for the uninitiated, it's pronounced like his actual name) had come about because he 'didn't just want to be a dumb actor who releases an album'. How does he feel about that statement now? 'I mean, that's a little harsh,' he says, sounding reflective. 'What I've learned is that a lot of people do something creative, and odds are they do something else that is also creative. It sounds a little dramatic in retrospect, [but] I think I just really wanted to be taken seriously. I was just trying to give myself the best shot at that.'
It's difficult not to be anxious about how your work is going to be received, right? He nods. 'Not for maybe, like … Daniel Day-Lewis. But everybody [else] wants to be in the cool crowd.'
Fittingly for an album full of expert, pastiche-swerving callbacks to artists of decades gone by, The Crux was recorded at Electric Lady studios in New York, made famous by Jimi Hendrix, alongside Keery's longtime producer Adam Thein. Despite its vintage vibes, it feels decidedly millennial in its malaise. A case in point: Basic Being Basic, which has a jagged 80s powerpop sound, while also rallying against Instagram culture, or as Keery sings, 'looking hot and keeping monotone and understated'.
'I was not trying to make some big, cultural statement,' he says. 'But [social media] is flattening culture, and I do think that we are kind of at risk of homogenising everything and losing rare things in different corners of the world.' He's a little more online than he has been in recent years, he says, 'but, yeah, it's horrible for us and ruining the planet. It makes everybody so self-conscious.'
Elsewhere, Egg – named after the Wings album Back to the Egg – zooms in on the angst that Keery still feels, in spite of his successes (sample lyric: 'Deep down inside / There's always that fear / That I'm not enough'). 'I suffer with fear and anxiety every day,' he says. 'A great example: you come home to your hotel or whatever. You're like: I could, like, go get a drink and meet some people. [Then you think] ummm, no, I'm gonna go upstairs. You're constantly confronted with the anxiety of interacting versus the payoff of meeting a new friend or having a new experience. It's always worth it to go and talk to somebody, but there's always a little voice that's like: well, we could just be safe right now, you know.'
Is it because he worries about being recognised? 'No, no, not because of that. It's just the fear of rejection, normal human stuff. Everybody has this little monkey on their back. Everybody wants to desperately connect, but also is afraid of it.'
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Really, though, there is a lot of that connection on the album. Keery's sisters sing on the Springsteen-in-training bop Back on You ('Why not have a love song for your sisters or for your friends or for your parents?'). Charlie's Garden – a jaunty paean to 70s pop – sees Keery and Heaton, who plays Steve's victim turned pal Jonathan in Stranger Things, perform an ode to the latter's home in Atlanta. What sort of things went on in Charlie's back yard? 'All sorts of bad stuff,' Keery says with a mischievous giggle. However, the place sounds incredibly wholesome. 'There was a cold plunge, ping pong. You're exercising, digging holes, pulling down trees, hanging lights. Guy does a lot of chores! He's a very good homeowner.'
The song – 'bouncy, fun, not serious' – is, Keery says, a tribute not just to Heaton and his partner Natalia Dyer (Stranger Things' Nancy) but to all his mates down there. 'It's a little tip of the cap to everybody in Atlanta who had such a big effect on me,' he says. 'My community down there ended up being so much more important to me than I ever thought that they would be. We're all bonded for life.' Being part of a huge TV franchise (Netflix's third most-watched series ever, at the time of writing) could sometimes feel uncanny, 'numbing' even. But, he says, 'we always had each other. It wasn't like being Macaulay Culkin or something, where you're like, the one person in that one thing. I always feel pretty lucky in that way, where it's like, I got one eighth of that …'
Keery says he's wary of following trends or trying to pre-empt what people might like. The album could be seen, he says, as 'a real reinterpolation of the classics, or dad rock-y. It's not sleek pop music or cool indie music, either. It kind of lives in this grey space of like … sort of happy, sort of cheesy. But I'm also sort of cheesy.' Being earnest can be synonymous with being uncool, but, says Keery, he thought: 'Fuck that. I do not care. If it's like: this sounds too much like this band to you, well, you know what? Listen to every other band that sounds like every other band. These are my influences.'
Criticism is a tricky subject between artists and journalists at the best of times. For writers, it often feels like a question of free speech and integrity. For artists, though, harsh reviews can obviously sting. Has he read, for example, the 5.9-rated Pitchfork review of the record, which calls it 'frictionless' and includes the line 'music you could imagine in a faux Urban Outfitters at Starcourt Mall [from Stranger Things]'.
'I read the headline enough to kind of get the idea,' says Keery. 'And, I mean, I understand it. You kind of can't really let it get you down, I guess, or affect what you're doing too much, to be honest with you.' He raises the same publication's review of Benson Boone's Coachella performance, which described the Beautiful Things singer as 'horrible, just godawful'. 'I read that and thought: 'My God, why would you do this to somebody?' You can not like stuff, but what's the real point? I guess you just can't let it sway you too much. You have to just keep following your creative instincts and doing what you find interesting.'
With Stranger Things now out of his calendar for good, what do those creative instincts look like? 'No idea,' says Keery drily. 'I don't have an acting job, if anyone's hiring! But I am a little addicted now to being in the driver's seat. [Being a musician] is different to being an actor, where you're the violin player in an orchestra, and you're doing your part for this bigger thing.'
Equally, there's a kind of freedom in being part of something larger than you, he says, and he would love to go back to his drama school roots and do some theatre. If he sounds a little undecided, he also acknowledges that it's good to have options. 'I've been incredibly lucky, so I do have a pretty heavy sense of impostor syndrome-slash-gratitude,' he says. 'It would be scary if that gratitude faded.'
Again, this could all sound a little saccharine, but with Keery it feels genuine – a humble response to just how wild the past few years have been. I mean, he basically soundtracked the pope's inauguration! 'That was,' he says, fighting back his laughter, 'so ridiculous.'
Djo plays Glastonbury festival on 29 June; The Crux is out now.