Becoming Djo: How Joe Keery took the No.1 spot from Taylor Swift
On January 2nd, 2026, “End of Beginning” went to Number 1 in Spotify’s Top 50 Global chart. It first entered the UK chart in February 2024, peaked at Number 4, and then came back for the top spot within a week. Why did a 2022 album track wait so long to win?
Joe Keery’s music story starts long before Stranger Things. As a tween he wanted the School of Rock dream for real, so he and a friend started playing. He grew up on his parents’ staples like The Beatles, and his first concert was Bruce Springsteen when he was 11. In high school he practiced guitar in a freezing garage, then moved into Chicago’s scene and released records with the psych rock band Post Animal.
Then Netflix pulled him out of that world. Stranger Things demanded time in Atlanta, and he has said he felt a huge fear of missing out on the community he left behind. He also worried about the “actor who releases an album” label, so he put his solo work under the name Djo to give himself a fair shot.
His solo work was never a quick celebrity drop. Twenty Twenty arrived in 2019, then Decide in 2022. For his third album, The Crux, he co-produced with Adam Thein at Electric Lady Studios in New York. It came out in April 2025 through AWAL. The rollout led with “Basic Being Basic” and a full touring run, with Post Animal appearing on select dates.
Keery has also admitted to imposter syndrome and anxiety around how seriously people take him. That pressure is part of the Djo project. It is pop music that sounds fun, while writing about attention and identity in a blunt way.
The song that finally broke through is about returning to Chicago, and it first took off as people used it under clips of their own home towns. In the UK it spent 28 weeks in the Top 100 before this latest leap. When the Stranger Things finale landed in the UK on New Year’s Day, the track surged again, and it even knocked Taylor Swift off Spotify’s Global Chart.
That is the real lesson. Virality did not create Keery’s music career. It exposed the one he had been building all along.
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