Djo Artistfacts

April 24, 1992
Djo is the stage name of Joe Keery, an American actor best known for his role as the popular high school student Steve Harrington in the Netflix series Stranger Things. Other credits on his resumé include the 2021 action-comedy film Free Guy and crime drama show Fargo.
While acting catapulted him to fame, music has always been another passion for Keery. He started playing music in his early 20s, initially under the name Cool Cool Cool.
Keery was a guitarist and the drummer for the Chicago-based psychedelic rock band Post Animal from 2015 to 2019, contributing to their first two albums.
In 2019, Keery launched his solo career as Djo, releasing the single "Roddy." While the music crafted by Keery under his Djo moniker exhibits a more relaxed and dreamy quality compared to Post Animal, both contain moments of swirling psychedelia.

"I think after having played with those guys for so long I think certain tendencies and certain traits of their writing styles has inherently rubbed off on me," explained Keery to NME.
He self-released Twenty Twenty, his first synth-pop psychedelic rock full-length album under the moniker Djo, in 2019. Keery followed it up with Decide in 2022.
Djo's music has gained popularity through TikTok, where users often discovered his music before realizing it's the actor Joe Keery behind the voice.
While not released as a single, one of the Decide tracks, "End Of Beginning," became Djo's first charting song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart after going viral on TikTok, debuting at #51 on the chart dated March 2, 2024.
Keery dated actress Maika Monroe from 2017 to 2023. She has been a muse for him on several of his songs, such as the Decide track "I Want Your Video," where he sings, "Some people smile and open up your eyes. This world needs you."
Joe Deery was a shy teenager until his sister dragged him into stage crew in high school. "I was like, I don't know... and she was like, no, you're going to love it," he recalled on CBS Mornings. That push led him to acting - and eventually to Stranger Things.
In the early days of his music career, Keery deliberately concealed his identity to let the music stand on its own. To add to the mystique, he wore a wig and costume during performances, once joking, "If it sucks, nobody knows it's me."

The look became so consistent that during his Lollapalooza set, his whole band dressed alike to deepen the ambiguity. "Which one is him?" became part of the show.
By 2024, Keery was famous enough that lookalike contests were taking place. When he appeared on Jimmy Fallon's show and the host brought this up, Kerry joked that he finished third in one of them, earning a $5 gift card to Arby's.

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