Adam Thein mixed Djo’s second album entirely on headphones — including a hit that went viral twice and topped charts five years after its release.

“It’s extremely bizarre. We definitely didn’t think it would ever get to this level. We both lived in the Midwest, and have a very DIY attitude to music. We just went, ‘We’ll just do it all ourselves, and who cares if we only have computers and headphones, we’ll figure it out.’ For the music we made like that to become so far‑reaching, we never expected that to happen. It’s very confusing. And yes, it’s absolutely life‑changing. I was thinking a few years ago that maybe I’d have to go back to working in the mail room or the grocery store. It’s been an incredible gift to be able to make music every day since then.”

The ‘we’ mentioned above are actor Joe Keery, famous for his starring role in the Netflix drama Stranger Things and as artist Djo, and musician/producer Adam Thein. The ‘then’ is what happened to Djo’s song ‘End Of Beginning’ in 2024, and again in 2026. Initially released in September 2022 on Djo’s second album Decide, it unexpectedly went viral in early 2024, and after being released as a single in March of that year, reached number 11 in the US and 4 in the UK, making it Djo’s most successful release by far. “UMG and TikTok had a disagreement, and UMG pulled a bunch of their music off TikTok [February 1st 2024]. Within a week of that happening, ‘End Of Beginning’ started to do better. It seems people were looking around for different music to use for their video clips. There’s a comedy drama series called The Bear that takes place in the city of Chicago, and people were making edits of it, and using ‘End Of Beginning’ as backing music. That appears to have contributed to it going viral.”

Then, in January this year, three and a half years after its initial release, ‘End Of Beginning’ charted again, becoming one of the most successful hit singles of the year so far and topping charts in the UK as well as a dozen other countries. The reason was, apparently, the Stranger Things Netflix series, which wrapped up its fifth and final season on December 31st, 2025. ‘End Of Beginning’ never actually featured in the series, so its newfound success was purely due to the song’s association with Keery.

Sweet Home Chicago

Joe Keery and Adam Thein originally met in 2015. “He was in Chicago, not far from us. Many of the people in Joe’s touring band and who we record with today met during that time. We’re a group of friends that’s stuck together for the last 10‑12 years. Joe contacted me again in 2017, by which time my wife and I were living in Eugene, Oregon. Joe said he needed some help finishing an album he’d made by himself while shooting Stranger Things. A friend of his had suggested me, and Joe recalled us meeting two years earlier. At that time I was working a mail room job, and spent time doing mixes at home overnight.

“Joe originally asked if I could master his album. I listened to it and thought, ‘Wow, these songs are great.’ They really blew me away. Joe had done the entire album in Logic, with programmed drums and so on, and I suggested that it’d be worth spending a little more time on the songs and I encouraged him to re‑record the drums, which he ended up doing in Chicago, with a couple of friends of ours. When all the material was complete, we mixed the album together over the Internet, communicating via Zoom. It was the first project I worked on as a mixer on which I was not also a musician. In the end, Heba Kadry mastered it, in May 2018, and Twenty Twenty was released in the summer of 2019.”

Joe Keery had recorded Twenty Twenty in a caravan on the Stranger Things set, on a laptop running Logic, with Shure SM57 and AKG C214 mics, and a Focusrite two‑channel interface. For Decide, he had moved on to Ableton Live and a Mojave 301 FET mic, while listening back on Apple AirPods. Adam Thein, for his part, used a desktop PC running Ableton, an Audient iD44 interface, and Audeze LCD‑X headphones. “At the beginning of the pandemic, Joe and I both had nothing to do, so we started making an album together, which became Decide. That’s when I decided to quit my other work, and go full‑time into music. We were each making instrumental demos at home, and sent them back and forth, and did sessions via Zoom. So I co‑produced the entire album, and co‑wrote most songs, though not ‘End Of Beginning’. Once the instrumentals were close to being finished, Joe would develop ideas for vocal melodies and lyrics, and he self‑recorded his vocals at home.

“In September 2021,...