Joe Keery was one of the original breakout stars of Stranger Things, but now his fame is going TikTok viral as his music is exploding on social media and climbing on the Billboard charts.
Famously, Joe Keery was not supposed to survive Stranger Things season 1. His character, high school jock turned big brother figure Steve Harrington, began the show as a prototypical bully whose main role was to date Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), push around Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton), and ultimately get killed by a Demogorgon. However, the actor’s take on the character proved to be charismatic enough that the Duffer Brothers rewrote Steve’s arc and turned him into a sympathetic figure dealing with his dismal post-graduation life of mall jobs and no dates.
Unfortunately, it seems that we are not going to see any more of Steve Harrington for a long, long time. Production on Stranger Things season 5 was interrupted by the WGA and SAF-AFTRA strikes of 2023 (as with virtually every other American film and TV series), and all reports indicate that the show is months away from finishing principal photography, let alone through editing and re-shoots.
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According to Stranger Things lead Millie Bobby Brown, there are still at least nine months of filming left on the show, which has been removed from its initial premiere date of 2024. As fellow lead Finn Wolfhard puts it, “It’ll take however long it’s going to take.”
However, in the meantime, Joe Keery’s other career is taking off in a big way. Before he was a globally famous Netflix actor, Keery performed in the Chicago psychedelic rock band Post Animal and currently produces solo music under the name Djo. It turns out that one of his tracks, “End of Beginning,” has gone viral on TikTok and is even charting on the Billboard Hot 100, currently sitting at #21.
@djo_time
Unusually, the track was not even issued as a single from Joe Keery/Djo’s album Decide (2022), which means that its 2.2 million (and counting) uses on TikTok seem to be occurring organically. Keery himself seems take by surprise at the viral success of the song (per Variety), saying, “I’m not on TikTok, so my friend and longtime collaborator Adam Thein let me know that something was going on. There’s a little Spotify recap page for the artists, and you can see sort of a bump and then it just kept on bumping, I guess. It was kind of crazy.”
Joe Keery continued, revealing that he was still working on music as well as his hit show, saying, “[N]ew music on the way. Coming up hot. Trying to finish that out and then obviously working on Stranger Things still — that’s always a thing that I’m doing.”
Related: New Eleven Revealed: ‘Stranger Things 5’ Update Confirms Millie Bobby Brown’s Fate
Stranger Things season 5 has been pushed back to a vague 2025 release date, although it is anyone’s guess when that could be. The upcoming batch of episodes will be the last of the series proper, though Netflix and the Duffer Brothers are already expanding the franchise in new directions, with a novel tie-in, West End stage prequel, and several reported spin-offs in direction. We’ll be hearing about Stranger Things for years more to come, but hopefully, that won’t be just because it takes that long for the final season to actually premiere.
But who knows, maybe Steve Harrington should give up his video store gig and consider a career in pop music.
Why is Stranger Things season 5 taking so long? Tell us your theories in the comments below!