Djo Finds Purpose and Shelter in The Crux of It All
Filled with big hooks and expansive arrangements, Joe Keery’s third solo album finds the musician and actor basking in the warm glow of his community.
Two years ago, Djo’s sophomore album DECIDE, a record crafted largely in isolation, saw Joe Keery tying himself in knots of anxiety, resisting change even as he threw himself at it. He cast a cynical eye towards the internet and his addiction to it on the slinky loop of “On and On” and spoke to the beleaguered introvert in everyone on the snarky, new wave-y “Gloom.” On the claustrophobic “Climax” and the late night pangs of “Figure You Out,” Keery looked inward for answers about his future, and he mourned a version of himself that never came to be on “End of Beginning,” a track that went viral online in 2024. DECIDE ended with the brief and vaguely menacing “Slither,” the music cutting off abruptly as Keery concluded his vocal melody on an upturned, optimistic note: “We all wanna be someone at the end of the day.”
Two-and-a-half years and over a billion streams later, Djo’s new album The Crux puts that picture into greater focus. Rather than leaning on funky synth-pop that veers into a sarcastic, dry lyrical humor, the songs on The Crux are earnest and feeling-forward, recalling both ‘60s and ‘70s baroque-pop (like the rolling, Fleetwood Mac-style fingerpicking of the effervescent “Potion” or the Abbey Road-era stomp of “Charlie’s Garden”) as well as the kind of heart-on-your-sleeve indie rock of the mid-aughts and early 2010’s that dealt in a similar type of earnestness. Songs like “Fly” and “Egg” are caught somewhere between Day on the Green and Garden State.
In stark contrast to those dark synths and tensely-coiled rhythms that contributed heavily to DECIDE’s sense of isolation, The Crux is instrumentally lush and expansive. Recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York, there is a vivid warmth to the album’s sound, which features a massive amount of live instruments (many of which Keery played himself)—acoustic and electric guitars, piano, mellotron, vibraphone, saxophone, trumpet. There’s a relaxed lean to The Crux and a confidence that emanates from Keery in a newly open way. His vocal performances are especially lovely: gorgeous, McCartney-like harmonies warm on “Golden Line,” a shout-chorus swaggers in “Gap Tooth Smile.” Keery is firmly in his element more than ever, even on the dance-pop outlier “Basic Being Basic,” or the chugging, Police-style guitar n’ bass of “Delete Ya.”