DJO - The Crux

For many, Djo is Steve from "Stranger Things"; for many others – because nowadays you can be extremely famous to some and a complete unknown to others – he's the guy singing one of the most viral tracks of recent times: that "when I'm back in Chicago I feel it", which the algorithm picked up and pushed until it drove "End Of Beginning" (the sixth track on "DECIDE", 2022, released as the fifth single in March 2024) to a billion and a half streams on Spotify. We're talking about Joseph Kerry, born in 1992, actor and musician, formerly guitarist in Post Animal, who performs under the name Djo and has now reached his third solo album.

Compared to its predecessor, where synths and psychedelia ruled the roost, this is a more alt-rock/indie-rock, pop-oriented work, in which Djo seems to want to take on pretty much all the music of the 2000s that in turn drew on Seventies–Eighties rock: so first and foremost the Strokes (Casablancas's influence is very evident on "Lonesome Is A State Of Mind", the opening track, and also on "Fly"), but also Interpol, Maximo Park…

The album was preceded by "Basic Being Basic", a lovely pop song that gets stuck in your head right away and ferries the sound of the previous album into that of the new one, which the following track, "Link", represents well, thanks to its winking, retro rock'n'roll, enriched by drum breaks that bring variety and depth.

"Portion" (and partly "Egg" too) is instead the acoustic-melodic side, tied to the rest of the album mainly through the vocals and the falsetto that crops up in pretty much every song. "Delete Ya" is a great unfinished idea: a verse that moves between rock and new wave eighties style works very well, but it's let down by an overly cheerful, poppy chorus that fails to deliver on what the verse promised.

There's also room for the Beatles-esque “Charlie's Garden”, followed by “Gap Tooth Smile”, one of the album's most joyful moments, drawing freely from 2000s indie rock. After that, the album progressively winds down, first with the pianistic, choral “Golden Line”, then with the rock march “Back On You”, and finally with the title track, which has stadium-ballad ambitions.

In conclusion, “The Crux” is a good album but one with a strong sense of incompleteness; the songs are there, so is the command of craft, as is the will to write direct, sincere material. But the blend of genres and influences doesn't fully come together, and rather than variety what emerges is a sense of uncertainty and instability, along with a touch of superficiality. Still, it's worth a few listens, worth appreciating for what it offers, in the hope that these good instincts can settle into more effective work.

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17/06/2025