Djo: Joe Keery on short attention spans, social media and swapping Stranger Things for pop stardom

Djo, the musician and Stranger Things actor better known as Joe Keery, is a student of the classics. So the opportunity to tour a famed west London studio – arguably the most famous in the world, although the name can’t be printed here as they technically don’t allow tours – is equal parts awe-inspiring and terrifying. As we wander around the cavernous studios and cosy control rooms on a chilly March morning, Keery, wearing a black woollen coat with a houndstooth beanie pulled low over his forehead, is mostly quiet and reverential. Given the opportunity to have a plink on a piano that Paul McCartney wrote one of the Beatles’ hits on, he keeps a healthy distance. His awestruck visage barely slips until we step into one of the studio’s most famous rooms, and a quizzical look flashes across his face: “This smells like my school!”

It’s not like Keery is any stranger to rarefied spaces. Since breaking out in 2016 as foppish bad-boy-done-good Steve Harrington on Stranger Things, he’s done all the award ceremonies and the talkshows and the fashion parties. His second album as Djo, 2022’s Decide, was a profoundly DIY affair – “five days in the studio, due to time and money constraints” – but his forthcoming third album was made at New York’s hallowed Electric Lady. “So many legends have recorded at that place, like Erykah Badu and D’Angelo, and then back in the day obviously Hendrix and the Rolling Stones and AC/DC,” he says. “So, so crazy.”

It’s been a busy few days for Keery, who is in London for the first time. Earlier in the week he presented the best new artist award at the Brits; after our chat, he is whisked away to Soho to meet a select group of fans. When we meet, it has just been revealed that End of Beginning – a winsome, intensely catchy hit from Decide that went viral on TikTok – has ascended to No 5 on the UK singles chart. (It is currently at No 4.) If Keery is overwhelmed or overjoyed, he doesn’t let it show; perched on a couch in the studio’s attic, he seems more astonished that he’s in the room where the Lord of the Rings score was mixed.

“The success has been kind of hard to quantify, but it’s been exciting. I feel really grateful that people are connecting to the song,” he says. “In terms of where it is on the charts, I almost have no way to process it – the goal is to keep recording music, and to record in cool places. As long as I can keep doing that, the rest is just icing on the cake.”

Born in Massachusetts, Keery has been acting and playing music since he was in school. But finding success as an actor first has meant he has had to battle some degree of impostor syndrome. Releasing music as Djo – and wearing a costume and wig not dissimilar to Shaggy from Scooby-Doo when performing it – was an attempt to get people to see his electronic-inflected psych-rock for what it is, rather than just a lark by the Stranger Things Guy. “I didn’t really want to capitalise on my name as an actor, and I wanted to dissociate Steve from Stranger Things from the music,” he says. At this point, however, anyone who knows Djo knows it’s Keery behind the moptop, which he has made his peace with. “I don’t think it’s malicious – at the end of the day, I’m fortunate to have a job.”

There’s an irony to the fact that social media has pushed End of Beginning to such heights, because Keery himself got rid of his accounts a few years ago (“It’s a long story, but I’m not trying to put anyone on blast”) and some songs on Decide touch on his distaste for it. “Isn’t it odd that social media is the reason the song is doing so well?” he muses. “It’s hard for me to maintain any sort of healthy relationship with social media. I have an account for Djo that I’m not in control of – otherwise it’s so easy to be sucked in. I saw a stat about the amount of time – in years – that you spend on social media in relation to your life, and I was like, ‘Goodness gracious, I gotta get off.’”

I ask if Keery is concerned about a similar fate as befell the musician Steve Lacy, who reached No 1 on the charts with his TikTok hit Bad Habit, and was dismayed to find fans were only attending his shows to hear the 30-second clip they knew from viral videos. But Keary is not familiar with the story. When I explain it to him, a look of horror creeps across his face. “Oh, that’s horrible! Oh God! That’s proof of short attention spans, culturally,” he says. “I’m gonna have to seek out Steve Lacy. I hope that doesn’t happen to me.”