It’s a retro kind of place, and looking around it could be straight out of a scene from Stranger Things. It should also be on a sandy beach, yet it’s in the middle of the warehouses and unassuming brick homes that make up Bushwick’s neighborhood. Aptly dubbed Vacations, waltz in and you’ll find faded yesteryear postcards from faraway places on the wall, frozen Tiki cocktails, and the sounds of Jimmy Buffett and Billy Joel ricocheting through the speakers. And if you just so happened to walk in and made your way up the snaking staircase one Saturday night earlier this sweltering summer, you may have seen a familiar face: unassuming and retro in his own way.

Little would one know that the man at the end of the bar isn’t a fledgling artist like so many may be here. Joe Keery is not only at the helm of one of television’s most beloved shows (the aforementioned blockbuster Netflix series, Stranger Things, which unrolls its highly anticipated and final season later this year), but is also riding high with his musical project Djo (pronounced like his first name) which continues to crash the charts like the waves depicted on this watering hole’s walls. Djo hit it big with the ubiquitous “End of Beginning,” and most recently with third album The Crux with rising, brash, and vulnerable single “Basic Being Basic.” 

“I’m usually bopping around the city like this,” Joe Keery tells me not long after he washed a few down at Vacations. It’s not his typical haunt. He visited for the occasion of his twin sisters, Kate and Emma’s 27th birthdays. “People generally don’t give me any sort of grief. I just put a hat on and nobody really pays attention, really.” Having just turned 33 this spring, Keery might not be able to say that for long. It seems like an apt place to start our conversation. 

How are you feeling being in your early 30s? 

It’s feeling like a good year so far. I’ve really enjoyed my 30s, but at the same time it’s been getting a little more real. Things get a little leaner and you start to focus on what’s important to you and things that matter to you. I think that everybody experiences that.

Speaking of, I know a big part of your life lately has been spent in New York City. What prompted the move here, as opposed to living in a place like Chicago, which you sang so eloquently and memorably about in “End of Beginning”? 

Well, I lived in Chicago and I’ve spent time in LA, but my whole family’s East Coast. I’ve got a couple sisters who live here and it’s always been a place that I’ve loved to visit and spend time in. It just felt kind of like the right kismet to come here: everything kind of clicked at the right time; I found a place, and it was just perfect for me. I’m the type of person who just likes being around a bunch of people and being in the heat of it. I kind of thrive in that environment.

There’s also something about being creative here; the city has that certain energy and a pedigree, especially with its history. I know you’ve fully utilized it, even recording The Crux at Electric Lady Studios, which was Jimi Hendrix’s baby before his death.
New York is great, especially if you can find your little pocket and sense of a community that I’ve found in my time here. Recording at a place like Electric Lady, it’s important to be able to step back and remind yourself about just how crazy it is to be there. You don’t really see anyone else when you’re working there. You’re just in your own sessions and doing your thing, but sometimes it’s cool to just step back, look at the records on the wall and remind yourself that Patti Smith recorded down the hall, David Bowie and John Lennon recorded “Fame” here. Led Zeppelin! It’s like a museum, but you’re actually using the things that are there.

I know you have a real taste for music history. So was it your choice to record The Crux there?
My manager knew Lee (Foster), who runs the studio and we went and toured it. Lee just took me around and showed me all the different rooms. I was instantly blown away obviously by just how curated and amazing it looks. A lot of the time, some studios are a shell and you gotta bring your own instruments. But Electric Lady has all of these cool little bits of gear everywhere, which could be very inspiring. We did one session, then another and kept going; it was just trying to just write as many songs as I possibly could and try to just get a little bit better. Before you know it, we had this record which brought a lot of catharsis for the things going on in my own life.

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Like any songwriter worth their salt, Keery’s lyrics are stripped from his real life. Take for example the aforementioned “End of Beginning,” the origin of which is drenched in irony. As the story goes, Keery was on location in Atlanta filming Stranger Things when he wrote it. Despite getting cast on the show, he felt isolated, overwhelmed, and simply missing his old life and friends back in Chicago, where he attended DePaul University. He put pen to paper and seemingly wrote the song as a goodbye to his beginnings of adulthood; one would say his former self before he became a cultural figure. “And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it,” his lyrics go. “Another version of me, I was in it.” Initially released in 2022, the public didn’t see itself in its intimate portrait until  last year when it became Djo’s first top 10 hit. Since then, it has been streamed nearly two billion times on Spotify and counting.

When it initially blew up, Keery actually had no idea: he was with his friends in the woods in Bloomington, Indiana. “I was kind of a little bit disconnected while it was happening,” he told me. “I don’t think I really understood what was going on. It’s different when you’re kind of inside it. Afterwards, we went to the UK and it was clear that the song had something going on.” The personal song Keery wrote in isolation was now a global sensation.

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When it comes to songwriters, who are your inspirations?
I love Bruce Springsteen and I love Paul McCartney for their lyricism and for the chords that they come up with and how they sound familiar, but I’m always after something new. How can we include little twists to make it different, but also make it sound like it’s been around?

I’ve always thought when songs sound right to you, it’s almost as if you’ve heard them before in a cosmic sense. Would you agree?
Yeah, there is some sort of magic to it. It’s just all these different frequencies that come together to make you sort of feel something. Djo is doing these opening gigs for Gracie Abrams right now. All these people are screaming her lyrics and it is kind of crazy that it can be this unifying thing, and it’s really from sort of nothing. There’s definitely some magic going on; something that cannot be explained. I also have no real training. I’m just following my own instincts  towards what I think is maybe good. So there’s also a level of feeling like, I’ve got no idea what I’m doing and I’m trusting whatever’s sort of leading the way.

Your lyrics are specific, yet obviously relatable. How do you pull off both tricks?
I don’t know. I think that’s the job though, to try to be true to yourself. I definitely tried to do that this time with The Crux, just to maybe be a little bit more blunt and a little bit more upfront about the way that I was feeling and speaking directly about things from my own life. There’s a selfish catharsis that you can get from it. It helps me say things out loud or to sing them. When you’re working on something and you’re putting down the vocals in the booth and you feel if you strike on something, you can tell. If it means something to me, then maybe it’ll mean something to someone else.

“Basic Being Basic” reminds me of that, with lyrics like “You’re scared of being basic,” and “Change your body, change your face, curl your hair then make it straight, Take a picture of your plate.” It all really reminds me about the social media age. One could also read it as a comment about your life post-fame, since you also sing, “I don’t want your money, I don’t care for fame.” So I gotta ask: did something trigger that song?
To be honest with you, it was actually just about this specific experience that I had in my own life that I was really upset about and wrote it in probably 40 minutes. I had a little demo and put it on my headphones and then was just walking around and, pretty quickly, spewed out all these lyrics. It was like a little bit of a fuck you, I guess. It was something that I needed to sort of get out of my system. So I do think it’s easy to look at the song now. When I look at it, I’m like, “Oh, it seems like I’m making this maybe cultural commentary.” But for me it was this really specific thing.

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Was it something that someone said to you, or something you read about yourself?
Something someone did to me, I guess, and I felt like venting. I guess it’s really like my journal. Sometimes I have the compulsion to kind of keep things in or to try to be nice and so it felt kind of nice to not try to be nice and felt like an important thing to include in the record. It just was maybe testing myself to not be nice. 

As I relate to the lyrics, I do find myself afraid of being basic like you said. Though it’s kind of this double-headed monster: being afraid of what people might think of you, but also balancing it out with trying to be your true, individual self.
Everyone’s afraid. Everyone. No one’s above it. Everyone wants to be cool. Everybody wants to be liked. I’m human as well. I absolutely have all of these fears. Someone posts a photo of [me] and I’m like, “Oh man, I look like such an idiot.” Or, “I’m too goofy.” It’s a challenge to try to incrementally care a little bit less. Maybe some people are just, totally disconnected from it. But I’m not, and I feel like it’s a struggle for me. I think I’m probably completely basic. I’m a pretty normal ass dude. I think we’re all a lot more alike than we would like to believe. And if that means that we’re basic, then so be it. If that means that we’re cringe, so be it. I guess it’s just about trying to, in small ways, just embrace yourself, block out the noise and care a little bit less. 

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It’s another layer of irony from Keery; even reaching his creative heights, he’s still a work in progress, like anybody. One chapter of that work, and his life, comes to a close when Stranger Things completes its stratospheric run later this year. The 80s-set series launched in 2016 after a casting call that wooed thousands of hopefuls. Around that time, Keery was already a working artist fresh out of DePaul University in Chicago, performing in the band Post Animal (a pre-cursor to Djo who Keery still collaborates with) and booking commercials, when he originally auditioned to play older brother Jonathan Byers, a role that would eventually go to Charlie Heaton. Instead, he was cast as Steve Harrington; he’s an initial enemy of Byers whose character experiences an evolution throughout the series. The day the first episode streamed, names like Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, and Noah Schnapp were complete unknowns. But as the series exploded, the cast, along with Keery, became cultural figures and subsequently infiltrated Hollywood. Uniquely, it was a ride they all went on together; experiencing the upside down of instant fame. 

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What was your last day on set like?
Oh man, you know, super crazy, especially the experience with all the friends I’ve made, and the crew. It’s the end of an era. Imagine going to college for nine years and then it being your last day. It’s like that. We’re all super close and the main takeaway for me is like, ‘Wow. I had this crazy experience and the thing that I really get to walk away from it is my relationships that I have with all these different people. It’s incredibly unique and something that I’m pretty grateful for.

Does it feel final now, or will it feel final when it premieres on Netflix this winter?
It feels like I’m just a fan like everyone else. I get to see some of it on set, but when it premieres a lot of it is new for me because I really am only there for like a third of the time based on the whole runtime of the show. So I’ll hunker down with my folks around Christmas and watch it like everyone else. I like being able to have that experience. It’s really nice.

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As Keery tells me, the finale of the series that changed his life is much more personal to him when it comes to the friendships he built. In fact, even though the final season premieres in three parts later this year (over Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve), he’s already said goodbye (Keery shot his final Stranger scene back in December). For now, he heads to Chicago’s Lollapalooza to perform to crowds of upwards of tens of thousands, there to listen to Djo—the musician, not the actor. Let’s call it yet another kind of beginning. 

​​Photographed by Ollie Ali

Styled by Chloe Hartstein

Written by Rob LeDonne

Grooming: Jessica Ortiz

Flaunt Film: Mynxii White

1st Photo Assistant: Taylor Hoellwarth

2nd Photo Assistant: Anna Letson

Location: W Union Square