Joe Keery unpacks his 'cathartic' new Djo album, The Crux: 'If you're just watering it down, what's the point?'

Joe Keery is figuring it out. 

For the better half of the past decade, the 32-year-old Newburyport, Mass., native has been most closely associated with his role as the world's best babysitter, Steve Harrington, on Netflix's Stranger Things, a character who works at Family Video by day and fights demogorgons by night. But recently it's his second creative outlet that's been gaining buzz: Djo (pronounced "Joe"), the mononym under which he writes, composes, records, produces, and arranges his own music. 

For a long time, Keery kept his two identities separate, staying off the covers of his first two albums, 2019's Twenty Twenty and 2022's Decide, and donning white jumpsuits, sunglasses, and orange wigs at concerts to obscure his Hollywood looks, which had been beamed into millions of households across the world. Everything changed, however, when his track "End of Beginning" — a love letter to his college town of Chicago — went viral on TikTok last year, shooting Keery's project into the stratosphere, and flushing away the remains of its "if you know, you know" anonymity with it. 

It wasn't the only thing rapidly changing in his life. Shortly after the release of Decide, Keery found himself navigating a Saturn-return-esque seismic shift as he dealt with a breakup, a cross-country move, and the demands of an array of projects that included the Emmy-winning series Fargo, Saverio Constanzo's Italian period drama Finally Dawn, and, eventually, the final season of Stranger Things. So, in 2023, with a wellspring of material pouring out of him, Keery holed up in New York City's Electric Lady Studios with longtime collaborator Adam Thein. From his journey of self-discovery came his third album, The Crux. 

"It really is basically just what's going on in my life," Keery tells Entertainment Weekly over Zoom, describing his new music. "It feels good, though. For me, it's cathartic to have an outlet to get it out."

The 12-track concept album serves as a travelogue of Keery's adventures through the lens of a fictional hotel, with each song operating as its own little vignette on his quest to better understand love, loss, change, and his personal identity. Across its 45 minutes, he picks apart his complicated feelings toward a former flame (sardonically calling out her too-cool energy on "Basic Being Basic" and mourning their sudden split on the gutting, Police-inflected "Delete Ya" the next), wrestles with deep-seated fears of inadequacy and being watched on a global scale ("Egg"), and makes it through to the other side with a little help from his friends ("Charlie's Garden") and family ("Back on You"), many of whom have cameos on the album.

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With its release, Keery is ready to ditch the fake hair and jumpsuit and step into the spotlight as his own brand of rock star. "It felt like for the presentation of the album going back to the wig and the glasses was a really fun conceit, but it just wasn't right for this project," he says. "I'm happy that it's a front-facing thing where it's really about me and my life, and the most authentic way to represent it, I thought, was to just kind of face it full-on."

It's why he chose to adopt less of a "head in the clouds" approach to his songwriting, focusing instead on being as true to himself as possible, hoping that listeners would feel a sense of connection and relatability. "I feel like every record is an attempt at trying to find the concentrate of what your voice is and getting a little bit closer each time," he says. "And this time, I felt like it was an attempt to try not to dress the music up as much and just write great songs — a song that you can listen to more than once, that means something to people."

Writing it, he adds, was a daunting experience — especially since The Crux details his inner world more transparently than his previous material, with its nods to Keery's close friend and Stranger Things costar Charlie Heaton and their younger castmates ("Delete Ya") and a reference to running through the snow while filming his other big show, Fargo (the wintery acoustic track "Fly").

"There's definitely moments [where] you second-guess yourself or you edit yourself,” he admits. "Like for 'Basic,' I had a conversation with friends and family and coworkers and people I was working with on the album: 'I just don't know about this, because this is going out into the world at the end of the day.' But then that's also your job, as a songwriter and as an artist. If you're just watering it down, what's the point? I think you really should try to be as direct as possible. And maybe the thing that you don't think you should say is the exact thing that you should."

The album also sees Keery leaning into the musical stylings of some his favorite artists of decades past: The clanging guitars riffs and spiraling synthesizers of "Link" echo the Cars; the dreamy "Potion" features some Lindsey Buckingham–like fingerpicking; and "Basic Being Basic" calls to mind the sparkling, LCD Soundsystem–style nostalgia of the early aughts. Even Queen frontman Freddie Mercury gets a shout-out on the rocking "Gap Toothed Smile."

"When I'm working on a song," Keery explains, "I feel it's my job to realize it in whichever way suits the song best: 'Oh, this feels like it would be, like, the Zombies, but what if it has a little twinge of, I don't know, Otis Redding?' I am a fan of music that is really eclectic. I like artists that do a lot of different things. I like albums that go to a lot of different places."

He and Thein also made sure to strategically sprinkle "ear candy" into as many tracks as possible, such as his dry commentary on "Basic Being Basic," or the shrieking gears of a New York City train on "Lonesome Is a State of Mind." Says Keery, "I love that part of the process. I think me and Adam both are always digging and trying to find interesting little sounds to be added."

As he explored his own feelings about love, Keery says he realized that every song on the album didn't have to be about heartache — he could also, he says, "sing about the people that I love in my life." Enter "Charlie's Garden," a dreamy Beatles-y ditty that he describes as "an homage for me to my great friend [Heaton] and my time in Atlanta," where he shot the forthcoming season of Stranger Things.

"Charlie and Natalia [Dyer, who plays Nancy on the show] lived together, and I lived with a friend, and our backyards touched," Keery recalls. "Over the summer, we'd have off days, and I would be hanging out, playing guitar, and I'd look back in the yard and he'd be digging, he'd be burying wire. He'd be doing all these chores." Heaton even pops up on the track, as a man who calls Keery about rescheduling plans for what seems like an audition.

He also pays tribute to his four sisters and his pals on the uplifting "Back on You," with his siblings lending their vocals and some stomps to the track. "Now whenever I listen to any of this music, I'm just thinking, 'How amazing is it that my sisters are on this, and how cool that we got to have this fun experience together?'" Keery says. "I love that. It's memorializing something in my life so that it really, really means something to me.” 

As Keery opens up about the album, he is preparing to embark on his sold-out Back on You tour, with his friends and former bandmates Post Animal coming along for the ride. As with The Crux, fans can expect an eclectic performance. "I've wanted to do this for a really long time," he says. "I never got a chance to tour with Post Animal for really more than a couple shows, so they're touring with us. It's really a bucket-list item for me."

That and his pit stop at Coachella. "It'll be a huge memory, I'm sure," he says of the festival. Or, in Keery’s case, another song just waiting to be written. 

The Crux is out now.