Djo embraces the quirk on ‘The Crux’
The cover of Djo’s third album The Crux, photographed by Neil Krug, conveys a frenzied scene that is in many ways a teaser of what’s to come on the record itself. A busy scene on sunny street finds passersby craning their necks to the clear blue sky above in which an airplane flies with a banner that reads “I’m sorry Cindy and I love you.” Djo himself scales the side of an apartment building, seeming to be looking for an escape. The image is chaotic and colorful yet somehow also appears balanced and harmonious.
The actual musical contents of the record find Djo, the moniker of actor Joe Keery, as musically assured as ever, packaging sunny guitars and sonics that are both spacious yet jam-packed into a 12-track cacophonous symphony of quirk and charm.
Djo’s emergence as a modern alternative pop-rock hero was fast-tracked by “End of Beginning,” a song that drips with sentimentality and found a massive audience on TikTok last year despite being released two years prior. To some less-in-the-know users on the social platform, the question of where Djo, who for several years prior was most known for his role in the Netflix series Stranger Things, came from seemed to be on the tip of everyone’s tongues. But the truth is that Djo had been pursuing music alongside his acting career for about half a decade. While his first two records, 2019’s Twenty Twenty and 2022’s DECIDE, earned him a dedicated audience (and performance slots at festivals like Lollapalooza and Boston Calling), he remained largely on the outskirts of mainstream consciousness. In the wake of the wave of popularity he’s experienced due to “End of Beginning,” he could have easily continued to copy and paste the formula that earned him viral popularity — but The Crux is far from a copy and paste scenario.
The LP’s opener “Lonesome Is A State of Mind” twinkles with guitar strums as Djo, in a hushed delivery, primes his listener for all that’s to come. “My future’s not what I thought /I think I thought it wrong,” he sings downcast on the first verse. At the arrival of the chorus, the instrumentation upticks into a full-bodied, sunny breeze that declares, “Thought that you were on my side/Lonesome is a state of mind/No, I won't be lonely anymore.”
The record’s first several tracks all flow out with easy-listening simplicity, featuring funky guitars, warbling bass lines and snappy percussion. “Delete Ya,” one of the record’s singles, immediately jumps out as one of the project’s highlights. Opening with a quick guitar riff before plunging into a bass and synthesizer-heavy verse, the song describes the sour sting of sentimentality that often lingers after a breakup. “Then there's a lyric that, in context, stings/The immediate pain it brings/That song that you used to sing,” he mumbles before launching into an addictingly catchy and funked-up chorus. For a track with such a universal (and commonly used) theme, it maintains its unique edge that Djo — with the assistance of his malleable voice — brings to his best work.
Although Djo’s voice may not have the gusto of a classic vocalist, he molds, morphs and transforms it into an instrument itself, taking it to quirky lengths that prove to be one of his strongest assets as a musician. Particularly in an era when having perfectly coiffed hair and a sub-standard voice are often celebrated as the norm, it’s both impressive and respectable that Djo appears unafraid to step outside of the “cool guy” archetype that he could easily ride the coattails of and instead throw caution to the wind. While allowing oneself to “get weird” isn’t a particularly new concept, his approach cuts through to the listener and energetically takes hold of their attention with quirkiness.
His voice whimpers, squeaks, belts and is layered to choral extremes across all 12 tracks, and is the LP’s most effective instrument — although the drum lines and synthesizers are pretty damn good too. Several of the songs, “Charlie’s Garden” in particular, sound like they’d perfectly soundtrack the sunny opening scene of an early aughts romantic comedy (and also sounds almost Beatles-ish) thanks to jumpy piano chords. Within the album’s different sonic and tonal extremes — whether cheery, bright, sentimental, downcast, self-assured — Djo’s musicality appears as clever and developed as ever.
Photo by Neil Krug.
