Actor on Djo, ‘End of Beginning’ & More

It’s a crisp Tuesday afternoon in New York and Joe Keery is happy to be home. As he clears the remnants of a late lunch from Sugarfish off the breakfast nook in his apartment and begins to prepare a green tea, he laments how little time he’s been able to spend here this year.

He offers up the obligatory “Sorry that the place may look like a mess,” but in reality, his West Village apartment is charming and cozy, with shoes neatly collected by the door, several guitars sprawled about the living room, an impressive VHS collection, various memorabilia adorning the handcrafted shelves that shield just a fraction of the space’s plentiful exposed brick and a drawing board with a handwritten message from his nieces that hangs near the kitchen.

Keery, 33, will head back out on the road in a mere matter of days, though, as he prepares for a jam-packed fall schedule. Of course, there’s the three-part final season of Stranger Things — in which he plays the beloved bully-turned babysitter Steve Harrington — premiering in late November that will require plenty of press. But first, he’s focused on the role that has defined his year so far: touring as the alt-rock artist Djo.

On the heels of a year in which his dreamy, synth-pop song “End of Beginning” went viral and peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 (his first entry on the chart), Keery returned this April with The Crux, his classic rock-influenced full-length recorded at New York’s famed Electric Lady Studios. The album’s lead single, “Basic Being Basic,” became his first No. 1 on a Billboard chart when it topped Alternative Airplay in July. And he’s been touring relentlessly in support of the project, including Down Under at the Laneway Festival, in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans at Lollapalooza in Chicago and at his own headlining dates across the globe.

As he gears up for his next string of shows beginning later this month — billed as his Another Bite Tour — he’s first treating fans to a batch of entirely new music, with the arrival of The Crux Deluxe out today (Sept. 12), a 12-track surprise release that extends the universe of his third album.

“The songs are all from the same period — it’s like a companion piece,” says Keery. “It can be like the punk little brother of The Crux, where it’s just a little bit more all over the place.”

When Keery whittled down the tracklist for the original album, there were more than two dozen contenders in the mix, thanks in large part to a concerted focus on seeing ideas through during the recording process. “We had an imperative to be like, ‘Let’s not leave the song unless it’s 80% done,’ ” he says. “Or else the song doesn’t really exist.”

Plans for the surprise release were solidified as early as May, when Keery and his steady co-writing/co-producing partner Adam Thein had a chance to revisit Electric Lady between legs of tour for some touch-ups — fixing a vocal issue on “Who You Are,” adding a second verse to “They Don’t Know What’s Right,” removing a few items from “Thich Nhat Hanh,” named after the Vietnamese monk, peace activist and poet.

Crucially, the aim was to avoid any sweeping changes during those sessions. “We didn’t want to do too much,” says Keery. “It should be a snapshot of that time period.”

The result is a deluxe album that sees Keery continuing to lean into his strongest influences: “Love Can’t Break the Spell” unspools the five stages of grief following a break-up in the style of Fleetwood Mac; the rebellious flair of “Grime of the World” slides seamlessly into any collection of garage rock-fueled favorites; “Purgatory Silverstar” is a quintessential example of Keery turning a song on its head, sometimes more than once, at a whim — a plucking guitar intro gives way to a Red Hot Chili Peppers-esque rock bridge that then opens into an odyssey with twists and turns reminiscent of Rush or The Who.

The Crux Deluxe also showcases his growing comfortability with experimentation: album closer “Awake” boasts both rollicking guitar ready to blow your hair back and, notably, a set of lyrics solely focused on syllabic fit over substance.

“I had read something about John Lennon for ‘I Am the Walrus,’ and [how] those are nonsense lyrics,” Keery says. “[‘Awake’] was going to be on the album originally. A lot of people were like, ‘Those are my favorite lyrics you’ve ever written.’ It’s like, ‘There you f–king go. Maybe you should let your subconscious do a little bit more of the work.’ You want to write something that’s profound or that connects with people, but there are a million different ways to do that.”

Then there’s “Mr. Mountebank,” a late swap with “Egg” from the album’s first installment. It’s the deluxe’s biggest dip into electro-pop, and Keery’s response in part to the success of “End of Beginning,” which he jokes makes him “kind of up my own ass.” (“Climb fast, money talks/ Then they want to sell you on what you’re all about,” he sings before reassuring his own standing with “Not afraid, not for sale/ Long game class acts never fail.”) In contrast to “Awake,” “Mr. Mountebank” is Keery at his most vulnerable on the deluxe, which can often flit between abstract metaphors and unfiltered lyrics about relationships, the industry and his own well-being.

“I want to be open,” he implores. “It’s just, sometimes you’re like, ‘What the hell am I trying to say? What the hell is this song about? Am I repeating myself?’ It’s less of being scared as it is figuring out what you really feel and trying to get honest with yourself.”

Keery acknowledges that in the aftermath of “End of Beginning” having its viral moment in 2024, there was a sense of added stress — potentially even subconsciously — leading into the release of The Crux this spring. For the rollout of 2019’s Twenty Twenty and 2022’s Decide, he had largely kept his life as a musician separate from the fame that followed his acting career, even going so far as to don a wig, sunglasses and a jumpsuit for the occasional live set. But with the runaway success of “End of Beginning,” any hopes of continuing to utilize a disguise went out the window.

“I felt more pressure — I was putting it on myself, for sure,” Keery admits. “The album was the first thing out after ‘End of Beginning’ had done well, so it’s like, ‘How do you follow something like that up?’ ”

But the longer that The Crux has been out in the world, the more he has felt that tension begin to dissipate, particularly as he’s been able to play it in front of fans around the world. His smile over the course of the afternoon grows the widest at the very instant he gets the opportunity to gush about being onstage this summer with his friends and tourmates — the psych-rock band Post Animal, which he departed in 2017 due to Stranger Things commitments but rejoined earlier this year, has been a special guest throughout the trek.

“I love that you get better — you really do,” he gleams, referring to the live set. “Bit by bit, you start to chip away at the thing. The shows that we were doing at the end of this run, there’s no way we could’ve done that at the beginning.”

With his Another Bite Tour wrapping at the end of October, and the finale of Stranger Things arriving on New Year’s Eve, Keery finds himself closing the book on multiple defining life phases by the end of 2025. “All good things must end,” he says, reflecting on the hit Netflix show’s wrap. “It was bittersweet. Everything you think [it would be], that’s pretty much exactly how it felt.”

His calendar is devoid of acting commitments at the moment — though he did recently star in “Loser,” the new music video from Tame Impala, whose upcoming album soundtracks part of our conversation — leaving his schedule for 2026 as something of a temporary question mark outside of a handful of South American touring commitments in March. “I’m at the end of this big chapter,” he says, leaning all the way back on the long cushion in his breakfast nook until he’s fully horizontal. “It’d be fun to reinvigorate myself and have a project that would do that. I would be really grateful for that.”

At the moment, music appears to be taking center stage on that front: Keery notes that he and Thein already started to kick around ideas for new music during their most recent outings at Electric Lady. He also mentions multiple times how excited he is to start playing around with the home set-up he has established in the corner of his living room, which will soon feature the first piano that he’s ever owned.

Plus, as an independent artist that continues to release his music through AWAL, Keery has the added benefit of being able to gearshift in real time, and pursue wherever one of his many passions may lead him next.

“It’s been able to give me autonomy over things that I want to do and it’s very liberating,” he says, gesturing to The Crux Deluxe as a perfect example. “I’m excited to surprise people. I think there has been a core group of audience members who have lived with [The Crux] for the summer, and a gift you’re not expecting is one of the best gifts.”