What is Steve from Stranger Things doing among the most listened to in the world?

From upside down to the top of the most listened to songs in the world on Spotify. He can't even explain how it happened. Joe Keeryaka Djo, the 31-year-old actor among the most loved in the universe of “Stranger Things”, the Netflix series – a pop phenomenon of recent years, between lo-fi, science fiction and horror – in which he plays the handsome softie Steve Harrington. But it happened: his “End of beginning” is this week the third most streamed song globally on the popular streaming platformbehind “Beautiful things” by the phenomenon Benson Boone and “Carnival” by Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign and ahead of hits like “Greedy” by Tate McRae, “Texas hold 'em” by

Beyoncé and “Cruel summer” by Taylor Swift. In the last week alone, the song, released a year and a half ago, in September 2022, has achieved global 38.8 million streams, while last week it had achieved 26.6 million. Not bad for a track from a record destined to become a cult project for independent music lovers. It has to do, of course, with TikTok. And a verse from the song, with a nostalgic flavor: “And when I go back to Chicago I feel like another version of me, I've been there”. The perfect soundtrack for clips – on TikTok the song has accumulated over 2 billion views – film in the US city where Keery began taking his first steps as a musician, even before his successful audition for “Stranger Things”.

Yes, because not everyone knows that in 2015, when he showed up at the auditions for the Netflix series, the then 24-year-old Joe Keery he played guitar in the garage and psych-rock band Post Animal, well integrated into the Chicago scene. The group had just released the mini-album “Post Animal perform the most curious water activities”, which was followed three years later – amidst enthusiastic reviews and dozens of performances on the stages of international festivals – with their long-distance debut ” When I Think of you in a castle”. It was in 2019 that Joe decided to start his own business under the pseudonym Djouploading the single “Roddy” onto the platforms, the appetizer of his first solo album “Twenty twenty”, between psychedelia, electronic, indie,

a little Mac De Marco, a little Tame Impala and a little Daft Punk. “When I discovered them as a kid I thought: 'What is this madness?'. I didn't really understand it because if I thought about bands, I thought about Bruce Springsteen's, Led Zeppelin,” he says of the “Random access memories” duo.

Initially thought of as an outlet, the Djo project has grown over the years, allowing Keery to gain performances even on very important and highly followed stages such as Lollapalooza, until the release of the new album “Decide” in 2022 (containing the same “End of the beginning”). No one, however, could have imagined that one of her songs would go viral on TikTok and consequently overtake pop stars such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift in the charts. “End of the beginning” has exceeded 140 million streams on Spotify. The exploit also took Keery by surprise, of course, who shared the demo of the song with his fans on Instagram, “recorded on the PC on a plane to Chicago”: “It winked a bit at 'No more I love you' by Annie Lennox, which I really like. I still hadn't understood the lyrics well. Eventually it became 'End of the beginning'”.

Who knows if Joe – who in the meantime is at the cinema with “Finally dawn” by Saverio Costanzo, together with Willem Dafoe and Lily James, filmed in Rome – will be able to enjoy some of the success of the song, with the work of the fifth and final season of “Stranger Things” having just come into full swing, as revealed by the creators , the Duffer Brothers: “I know that many people have discovered my music thanks to 'Stranger Things' and I am grateful to the series for this and for everything it has allowed me to do”.