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.”
