CONCERT REVIEW: DJO | STAGE AE | PITTSBURGH , PA | 07.14.2026

The humidity was so thick on Tuesday (June 14, 2026) night, the sold-out outdoor crowd at Pittsburgh’s Stage AE was sweating before they even got into the gates. That was the scene as Djo, aka actor Joe Keery, kicked off the headlining leg of his oddly structured summer tour, a run of shows threaded in between his support slots for Tame Impala’s Deadbeat Tour. Pittsburgh got the first of those headline dates, and the city showed up for it.

Opener Pond, the long-running Australian outfit tied at the roots to Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, did their part to keep the sweat flowing. Frontman Nick Allbrook is a genuinely wild performer to watch, like a glam Mick Jagger. He was flopping and strutting across the stage, swinging the mic cord around via his neck, and all kinds of other antics. The band leaned into their heavier, more stadium-sized instincts rather than their weirder studio tendencies. It made sense as a warm-up act. It also made me wish I’d been catching them in a club instead of a half-lit amphitheater, where some of that psych-rock detail gets lost in the wash.

Keery’s set opened with “Awake” with all the murky synths and red light, Keery half-murmuring rather than singing, before the band detonated into the song’s back half. On the album that’s a slow build. Live, they stretched the outro out even further before snapping straight into “Change,” which flips the whole mood into something brighter and more danceable. That whiplash, dark into light, ended up being the organizing idea of the whole night.

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Most of the set pulled from 2025’s ‘The Crux,’ and it’s clear why. It’s the album where Keery stopped sounding like he was auditioning genres and fell into his own. There are so many direct influences evident in the songs, it’s impossible to list them all, from McCartney and Rundgren to Pavement to the Strokes, and so many more. “Basic Being Basic” the first single of the album, is like new new wave, and the crowd knew every syllable. The explosive noise from the crowd when he started the song was deafening. “Link” swings folkier, closer to 2000s indie, and “Lonesome Is a State of Mind” into “Potion” gave the whole middle of the set a warm, breakup-record hush.

It was around here that Keery broke to check on the crowd with genuine concern, given the heat. The audience was drenched just standing there, mostly because of the heat but also because a security guard was blasting them with a very welcome spray from the hose. At one point Keery just fell over onto the stage and just said, “It’s so hot!” letting out a giggle afterward. Then he told everyone to keep the water coming. Fair warning appreciated.

The back half of the set is where ‘The Crux’ earns its reputation as Keery’s most personal record. “Roddy” and “Fool” are a strong one-two, the former dreamy and inward, the latter funkier and looser. “Charlie’s Garden,” written about his “Stranger Things” costar Charlie Heaton, is the closest thing to a Beatles homage in Keery’s catalog, and the band ran it straight into “Gap Tooth Smile” without a breath in between, one song’s daylight giving way to the other’s classic-rock swagger. “Delete Ya” got a longer, moodier intro than the record gives it, more Cure than Cars for a minute before the song proper kicked in.

“Fly” slowed things down again, phones lighting up across the lawn, before “Egg” and set-closer “End of Beginning” did what that pairing always does. The latter got stretched on both ends, a longer intro and a longer outro, giving the singalong room to breathe before Keery let the crowd carry the hook solo for a stretch. It’s his biggest song for a reason.

The encore paired “Chateau (Feel Alright),” which might honestly have worked better tucked into the main set’s quieter stretch, with “Back on You” as the actual closer, and that was the right call. It’s the warmest song he has, and it sent the crowd out sweaty and grinning rather than wistful.

There’s still a temptation to talk about Djo strictly in relation to Stranger Things, and there were plenty of homemade shirts in the crowd proving that pull is real. But watching Keery move between guitar and keys, restaging songs live in ways that genuinely change how they land, it’s obvious the music isn’t a side project riding on TV fame. It’s the other way around at this point. He’s not figuring out how to be a musician anymore. He already is one.