Actor-musician Joe Keery spoke with Paste about working at Electric Lady Studios, his “musical marriage” to Adam Thein, evoking Electric Light Orchestra and Boston on The Crux, choosing authenticity over subversion, his fling with accidental pop stardom, and, yes, the blockbuster virality of “End of Beginning.”
After stripping down to his underwear and banging his head against the floor of a Royalton Hotel room in New York, Leonard Cohen spent four years filling notebooks with the lyrics for “Hallelujah.” Later, he claimed to have penned anywhere from 80 to 150 verses for the song. “Why isn’t ‘Basic Being Basic’ 10 minutes long?” I ask Joe Keery, pointing to the brisk, two-and-a-half-minute lead single from his new album, The Crux. “People don’t need all the other verses that we wrote,” he replies, before pivoting: “Why can vinyl only be 45 minutes? That’s the real question.” Keery, whose solo music is the love child of a stratum of influences that predate his own birth, can get down with a good old-fashioned double LP. But his heart remains in the arms of one-disc releases and sample-sized singles. Even in the sacrifice of a shortened runtime,“Basic Being Basic” is a delicious, Cake-style bite of Oberheim OB-X8-fueled, synth-pop splendor—a dig at anyone trying to be, as Keery puts it, “of the moment.” He sings about Vera Bradley being in vogue, “Tarantino movie taste” and the empty epitaphs of cultural trends. The song’s only flaw is that it ends too soon.
For many, Joe Keery’s name is inseparable from that of his beloved Stranger Things alter ego, Steve Harrington. Since the Netflix show’s breakout nine years ago, Keery has taken turns in indie flicks like Slice, Spree, Marmalade and Pavements, which will see an official (but limited) theatrical release in early May, and even wowed audiences with his appearance in the fifth season of Fargo last year. But there’s an entirely different demographic of people who first knew Keery as a necessary figure in Chicago’s mid-2010s indie rock scene. Before he was a TV heartthrob, he was a guitarist and drummer in the psych-rock outfit Post Animal, working in a community full of bands like Twin Peaks, Finom (formerly called OHMME), the Walters, Ratboys, Dehd and Pet Symmetry. Before he had Funko Pops of himself or inspired a generation of Halloween costumes, Keery was a pizza delivery boy moonlighting as a DIY, basement-bound rock star named Cool Cool Cool in the Midwest’s music capital.
Two years after quietly parting ways with Post Animal because of his busy filming schedule, Keery began teasing a return to music in July 2019, dropping “Roddy” (a song I crowned the “best of the year” in a blog post written from my college dorm room) in disguise a mere three weeks after the premiere of Stranger Things 3 and releasing his solo debut, Twenty Twenty, barely two months later. The album—a collage of droopy, pitch-shifted, lysergic synthwave; enthusiast-minded rock noir; and sentimental, prompt-filling, one-man-band efforts—was an inspired debut from a talented guitarist turning into a talented songwriter. Keery approached Djo with anonymity, sporting fake mustaches and monochrome jumpsuits. It was an effort to make a “the sum is greater than its parts” statement. “I think that can be a really engaging element, if done correctly,” he told me a year ago. “I think, a lot of the time, my goal is to surprise people or do something that’s slightly unexpected—because I think audiences are so smart these days and there’s so much media that you can just predict before it even happens.”
All of this helps Keery’s argument that Djo is not a vanity project—and it isn’t, to be clear. This isn’t like John Travolta getting famous off Welcome Back, Kotter and then making bubblegum Top 40 hits in the interim before Saturday Night Fever, or Eddie Murphy’s post-SNL Hollywood stardom opening the door for him to record all-pizazz-but-no-substance tunes like “Party All the Time” in 1985. Keery’s efforts remind me of Keanu Reeves’ 30-year tenure in Dogstar, though his interests in a serious music career have been far more sporadic and far less compelling. The truth is, had the stars not quite aligned so beautifully for Keery a decade ago, he’d probably still be in Chicago rocking gigs at Thalia Hall, the Empty Bottle and Schubas right now. “My goal was never to be a pop star,” he admits. “The goal is always to do it because I really like to do it and hopefully find other people that really like it as well. As long as that can continue to happen, I’ll get out of it what I need.”
The music of The Crux feels brightly hi-fi. It helps that Keery and his core collaborators—Adam Thein and Wesley Toledo—made the record “during the daytime” at Electric Lady, Jimi Hendrix’s Greenwich Village studio that has spawned generational, career-defining albums from Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and Patti Smith. In the decades since, the studio has not only turned into a home base for Jack Antonoff’s producer escapades, but ground zero for every Taylor Swift recording (and re-recording) since Lover.
Electric Lady is the kind of venue where, on any given day, Lana Del Rey and Interpol might both be making albums at the same time, splitting residencies in Studio A and Studio B. You can feel the history in there, but what really ended up informing The Crux was how Keery, Thein and Toledo would show up at 9 AM for their sessions. “Something I learned about myself is we come in a lot earlier than most musicians,” Keery says. “For the first couple months of this project, we’d be like, ‘Okay, we’ll be here at nine tomorrow.’ People would be like, ‘What?? You’re coming in at nine?’ Most people that come in at two or three stay half the night. Me and Adam, we were on daytime hours.”
“How quickly does everything get larger in a studio like Electric Lady?” I ask Keery. “I think everything just gets more real,” he replies, “and, sometimes, not in a good way. Sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh, shit, I’m terrible.’” I probe, “Is there a moment from the sessions you can remember really feeling that way?” He responds before I can finish the last syllable: “One? Oh, there were millions. Every day. You’re always battling a little bit of that.”
The Crux marks the third LP Keery has made with Thein in six years. Their bond is strong, built on core values of honesty. “It’s pretty rare that the egos are left aside,” Keery says. “I feel like everybody has their issues here and there but, really, he’s my brother. And we’re fighting this fight together and working on these things together, just because we love to do it and we love working with each other. That’s pretty rare.” He and Thein are “happily and musically married” and have perfected their combined desire to “try anything” in the studio, whether it’s an idea they love or hate. “Everybody wants to have someone to collaborate with,” Keery admits. “I got really lucky in finding Adam.”
After jumping into the deep end on Twenty Twenty, Keery and Thein made a standalone single, “Keep Your Head Up,” in 2020 and “Beyond the Grave,” which Keery co-wrote with Post Animal’s Jake Hirshland under the name +Dungeon. Djo’s sophomore album, Decide, was a winking rigamarole of 8-bit, vocodered computer pop, intense MIDI and stabs of Tame Impala psychedelia and Talking Heads listicle singing. For the brief run of shows Keery did after Twenty Twenty came out, the music was better-equipped for a full-band setup. “I remember one of my concerns while recording was, ‘How am I going to do this live?’” he says. “I love the Strokes, and I was thinking about their setup: You got two guitars, you got a bass player, you got some keys, but you can’t do too much. In a way, those restrictions informed how [Twenty Twenty] sounds.” When he started making Decide, he and Thein said, ‘Fuck any limitations’ and embraced the vastness that electronic-based, at-home recording afforded them: “I remember being like, ‘Ah, it’s probably gonna make it really hard to do it live eventually,’ but I also think going as hard as we did is key to the identity of the sound of that album.”
To prepare for his first-ever multi-month headlining tour as Djo, which starts in earnest this weekend in Portland and carries into Coachella next week, Keery has been rearranging the Decide songs to better serve the live band configuration in 2025. “Gloom,” “Figure You Out” and “Half Life” already got the treatment during a recent string of Australia dates. “It’s a challenge,” he admits, “and it is very different. Listen, it’d be simple to just play a bunch of tracks and do that, but I’m pretty keen on trying to do as much of it live as possible. The reason we have so many hands now is so that we can do that.” He’s got his Javi Reyes playing keys and guitar, Slow Pulp’s Teddy Mathews on auxiliary percussion, Kainalu’s Trent Prall on bass and synth, Toledo on drums and Sam Jordan, who’s been in every touring iteration of the group since 2019, on guitar.
Keery and Thein tracked the Decide songs together in their Los Angeles home studio and mixed and mastered them at the Sound Factory on Selma Avenue, except for “End of Beginning,” a late addition to the tracklist in the final days of recording. It was the only song done in totality at the Sound Factory, and the only song Keery never demoed. “I [told Adam], ‘We could do this one,’” Keery remembers. “We had used the studio up until that point for finishing stuff. Not that it wasn’t fun, but it was basically going down a checklist. You’re not being creative, you’re just copying stuff vocally. What I love is being creative and capturing something in the moment—that’s the addiction for me.” He liked making “End of Beginning” so much that he knew LP3 would be his first proper “studio album.” While Keery was in New York working on “Link,” “Back On You” and “Lonesome Is a State of Mind,” “End of Beginning” went viral on TikTok (Keery referred to it as getting “tokked”), reaching #11 on the Hot 100 more than 16 months after Decide came out.
“End of Beginning” cruised through various Spotify accolades—it currently sits at 1.4 billion plays—and not only went platinum and gold in 20 territories, but it was the sixth-most streamed song in the world in 2024. When Keery started Djo, he was making earnest efforts to separate his music career from his acting CV. “End of Beginning” ruptured thanks to an “If I won the lottery” trend, not because of his name. The revelation that Djo is Joe Keery became the prize for unsuspecting listeners without a clue. Let me quote one TikTok video in particular from that period: “JOE KEERY IS DJO BRUH I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO STEVE MOTHERFUCKIN HARRINGTON FOR THE PAST 2 YEARS WITHOUT KNOWING.”
Five years after putting the sunglasses and wig on for the very first time, Keery finally got that organic acclaim he’d been coveting. “It was like, ‘Hey, wow, that worked. What the hell?’” he recalls. “It was rewarding and cool that people like that song—still lost on me, to be honest with you, that so many people like that song.” Like Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine” in 2023, Djo’s year quickly morphed into a blockbuster because of an album deep cut. “A lot of people on our team were like, ‘That should be a single!’ And I remember being like, ‘No, it shouldn’t,’” Keery adds. “I definitely fought it. When you’re trying to pick a single, you’re like, ‘What can broadly appeal to so many people?’ And people don’t want that, they want specificity. That’s what people hook into.”
I ask Keery, “Do you think the noise was good for you, to have more ears on your music than ever while you’re working on what you hope will be the best record you’ve ever made?” He tells me that a lot of The Crux was already written by the time “End of Beginning” blew up, though a lot of the tracks were still works-in-progress. “It was like, ‘Well, I guess if they like that song, maybe there’s a chance that they’ll like these other songs,’” he continues. Had he been starting the album from scratch once the buzz awakened, things might have gone differently. “I probably would have been like, ‘Oh, shit, I gotta write a bunch of ‘90s alternative-sounding music right now,’” he jokes, though his most recent film role—playing Pavement bandleader Stephen Malkmus—suggests a Djo alt-rock record might be a fruitful experiment.
Keery worked on the bones of The Crux all around the world, writing songs during the open pockets of his multi-year filming schedule. Loneliness runs its course in these songs, as he sings about being seen “through the eyes of the world” (“Egg”), relationships between continents (“Delete Ya”), moving to a new coast (“Fly”) and trusting in faultless love in spite of cruelty (“Golden Line”). The music became Keery’s anchor amidst the busyness. “I was living in LA at the time and then, as the recording was kicking off, I left LA and started this series of jobs on the road. It was pretty much brand new from that point on,” he says, pointing to the benefits of writing while always in motion. “It was a little project I could go back to consistently, and it was the way that my life was happening at the moment. It definitely bled into the songs I put on the record. The process was gathering these little bits, little bits, little bits and then bringing them to New York and filling them in and then going back out into the world and doing it all over again for, like, two years.”
The first batch of songs he brought back to Thein included “Back On You,” “Link” and “Lonesome Is a State of Mind,” though “Lonesome” didn’t get finished until the very end of the sessions in the summer of 2024. “Gap Tooth Smile” came together in a 36-hour, “wham bam thank you ma’am” flurry, and Keery wrote, tracked and finished “Potion” by himself in three days because Thein and Toledo weren’t available to record. Making The Crux was, in Keery’s words, an act of “wish fulfillment.” “I’m like, ‘Let’s record in a really sick studio. Let’s just go all out and pay homage to these records that I love,’” he says. His and Thein’s modus operandi became the act of “reawakening,” and they took big swings to get there. So, he brought in the Brooklyn Youth Choir to sing all over “Back On You” last summer. “The kids are insanely talented, so polite and cool,” he remembers. “To be able to watch them work was incredible, and to have it represented on this album is really cool.”
Along with his Stranger Things castmate Charlie Heaton being credited as the “groundskeeper” on “Charlie’s Garden,” Keery called upon engineers John Rooney and Austin Christy, woodwindist Zem Audu, cellist Ana Monwah Lei, violinist Sally Gorski, vocalists Veronica Capaldi and Nadya Laska, trumpeter Josh Shpak, Post Animal’s Jake Hirshland, Dalton Allison, Matt Williams and Javi Reyes, drummer Teddy Mathews, photographer-turned-singer Courtney Sofiah Yates, and his sisters Emma, Kate, Caroline and Lizzy to bring The Crux to life. “That was something on this album that I really was excited to encourage,” he says. “I came up in the 2010s where the one-man show was a really revered thing—Mac DeMarco and Kevin Parker, obviously. I wanted to emulate that when I first started, just doing it all myself. But on this record, it was more fun to have your buddies around. It makes the process a little easier, and it makes me able to sit back and play this more producer-director role that I really like playing. Thankfully, I have a bunch of cool, fun friends who are down to collaborate.”
The final two songs on The Crux—“Back On You” and “Crux”—both feature all of Keery’s old Post Animal bandmates because “they were in town. “We were all hanging out and [‘Crux’] was a song that I had. I was like, ‘Hey, you should come by and we can play on this track and record it together,’” he says. “Back On You” features Keery’s siblings, along with his sweet and affirmative devotion to them (“I’ve known my sisters for a lifetime. I count my lucky stars that I have them, ‘cause every day they are a lifeline—an inspiration just to be a better man, that’s the truth”). It was his big sister Caroline who encouraged him to pursue acting 10 years ago (and caught a mention in “End of Beginning”), and his connection with her, Emma, Kate and Lizzy bleeds into his music, too. “They’ve had a massive influence on me, and I would be a different person without them,” he mentions. “[‘Back On You’] is a way to memorialize, when I’m old and gray, that we’re all on this track. It’s emotional for me, and it’s a special way to end the record. It’s laying your heart out, but in a good way. What better reason to sing a song than to say the way that you feel about the people in your life that you love?”
The album’s lead singles, “Basic Being Basic” and “Delete Ya,” share interlocking themes of consumerism, connection, celebrity and internet culture. Those threads pass through “Crux” and “Potion,” too. Keery claims to not be an “overarching mastermind” and wants to “let someone else put all the pieces together,” but, when he was writing this album, he was questioning his privilege in the world and reckoning with where he belongs. “I’ve been put into this position where I’m able to do these things that I love,” he says. “What responsibility do I have to other people and to myself?”
If, since hearing “Basic Being Basic” and “Delete Ya,” you’ve been expecting The Crux to be Decide’s dance-pop successor, you’ll be in for a treat once those Electric Light Orchestra-inspired harmonies in “Lonesome Is a State of Mind” and “Link” first launch into you. The Crux is full-on pop expanse, caught in-between the infinity of Chicago-era, horn-led rock music; chugging, War On Drugs-style, Queen-referencing stadium bangers; rhythmic and tactile Police-toned guitars; and a lush, Beatlesque stratum of dense, vibrating curios. Keery has always been good at the singles part but, just as “Change” and “Gloom” gave way to the half-hour of bombastic, splashy and digitized level-ups waiting beyond it, “Basic Being Basic” and “Delete Ya” are the hook-minded doorways welcoming us into the unpredictable but excellent color of The Crux’s greatest golden oldie tributes. These are songs that hit the spot and then some.
When Keery was still in Post Animal, the band utilized a four-guitar dynamic. And the riffs were heavy. Their 2018 debut album When I Think of You in a Castle, which features Keery singing lead on “Ralphie” and “Dirtpicker,” was one of the last truly bonkers guitar records of its era, calling to mind the nebula of riff-hounding rockers of yesteryear—the Rainbows, Deep Purples, Bostons, Blue Öyster Cults and 38 Specials that crowded the zeitgeist with head-splitting sonic bends 50 years ago. Crux songs like “Gap Tooth Smile,” “Link,” “Egg” and “Back On You” charmingly tug at Keery’s Post Animal roots while paying great reverence to the music he was into as a 15-year-old Newburyport kid. “I was getting back in touch with some of the influences I loved at that age—AC/DC, Thin Lizzy, Zeppelin,” he says. “It’s something that I feel like is a lesson I learned from the [Post Animal] guys, and it’s always there for me.”
Keery knew he wanted to play more guitar. “I felt like I had gotten away from that on Decide,” he admits. “I wanted to bring it back to guitar, specifically acoustic guitar, because it was something I hadn’t spent a lot of time with. I felt like, when I was looking back on Decide, I realized I couldn’t pick up my acoustic guitar and play the songs.” He clarifies that Decide still means a lot to him, but that those songs were emboldened and created by his and Thein’s production. “This time, I started with, ‘What’s the song first? We can always arrange it and put little bells and whistles on it later.’”
It became a conscious effort, then, for Keery to break away from the synth- and dance-pop that colored so much of Decide and even parts of Twenty Twenty, an album that also homed in on the heavy guitar playing on “Tentpole Shangrila,” “Personal Lies” and “Flash Mountain.” “[Decide] was so in the box for me,” he says. “It was driven by the fact that it was being recorded on a computer.” When he started writing The Crux, Keery wanted to step away from at-home recording’s paradox of limitless limitations, hoping to expand his catalog with an album that screams “organic” more than it does “formulaic.”
“It really bothered me that everything had to go through the computer,” he adds. “I was like, ‘Get me the hell away from this thing. Let’s just write a song the old fashioned way.’ We’re still working in Pro Tools, but it’s a slightly more natural way to go about it. Instead of being more production-forward, [The Crux] is more song-forward.” Renting a room at Electric Lady certainly made getting from Point A to Point B easier, as Keery, Thein and Toledo took full advantage of the studio’s repertoire of gear. The Crux was, as he puts it, made “the classic way.”
Rather than electronica, The Crux offers listeners potent doses of piano playing from Keery. There’s a real Abbey Road-era Paul McCartney lushness lingering in nearly every track’s bottom line, especially the harmonious, multi-faceted “Golden Line.” You can hear a real Elephant 6-evoking, EastWest Studios influence there, especially in what might be among Keery’s finest on-tape moments, when he sings, “Yes, it’s true, I do it all for you.” It can be difficult to nail a piano part nowadays, especially in a classic rock kind of way, because so many artists have spent the better part of a century doing exactly that all the time. But in “Golden Line,” Keery’s voice dominates the foreground. He’s naked, really, for the first time ever on an album. “It was a dare to myself to go there,” he says. “And, you know, that’s just what I got, so I might as well just lay it all bare, rather than trying to layer it a million times or put some big effects on it.”
The cruces that spell out this project are gestures of honesty, and that was Keery’s intent. He’s no longer measuring the distance between himself and his listeners via cryptic lyricism and Andy Kaufman-honoring disguises. To nourish that strategy, he put a focus on writing songs that worked for him. Naturally, McCartney was touchstone. “I’m such an admirer of the way that he uses his voice in such different ways,” Keery says. “I remember as a kid, when we listened to the Beatles in the car, I would try to guess who the singer was. And I always was shocked. It’s crazy that the same guy who sings ‘I Will’ sings ‘Monkberry Moon Delight.’ It’s insanity, and it’s quite a little acting challenge that he’s doing. He’s shape-shifting to fit the song.” Bowie does that too, I say. “Just because you’re the same artist it doesn’t mean you have to pigeonhole yourself to sound the same all the time,” he carries on. “I love an eclectic record. I love Abbey Road, along with 99% of the world.”
Keery is giving The Crux to us straight. No wigs, no sunglasses. It’s just him in a two-tone suit, withholding the unconventional theatricality of Twenty Twenty and Decide, and combating the transience of his acting career with friends-and-family-assisted jams and big, widescreen pastorals of a multi-generational rock and roll lineage. There’s no more anonymity or Devo-style subversions for Djo, and any facial hair is unintentional. “I wanted to face the music and own it,” Keery says. “It felt like what was needed for how authentically I made the music. It felt like the right way to release this music, to own it.” He admits that he’ll always be a fan of concepts, trickery and surprise, but the process behind this album was all about pushing himself. So, why not continue to do that? “It felt like the scariest thing to do,” Keery concludes, “to just release The Crux as me.”
The Crux is out April 4 via Awal.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
