Djo: Decide [AWAL]

Why you'll love it

Decide is Joe Keery's bright, synth-heavy second album as Djo, written and produced with Adam Thein. "End of Beginning" went viral in 2024 and took Djo onto the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, peaking at No. 11.

About the album

Most actors with a side project keep it politely in the garage. Joe Keery, better known to most of the planet as Steve Harrington in Stranger Things, took his all the way to the charts. Decide, his second album as Djo, came out in September 2022 and marked a swerve away from the psychedelic rock of his 2019 debut, Twenty Twenty, into glossy synth-pop and synthwave.

Keery wrote and produced the record with Adam Thein, building most of it over screen-shared Ableton sessions during lockdown and finishing it at The Sound Factory in Los Angeles in late 2021. He called it a sort of aural history of his late twenties. "Change" and "Gloom" set the tone as early singles, "Half Life" and "Figure You Out" lean into shimmering, slightly anxious pop, and "On and On" stretches out over a hypnotic groove. Heba Kadry handled the mastering, and Ted Mathews sits in on drums.

Then, a year and a half later, "End of Beginning" took off on TikTok and sent a whole new crowd back to the album, which climbed into the top 25 of the Billboard 200 and the top ten in the Netherlands. A song that sat quietly on side one for eighteen months became the thing everybody hummed in 2024, which is the most patient overnight success we've heard of.

Also at Kops: more Djo on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On AWAL, a reissue of the 2022 album.