The Song That Waited: How Djo's "End of Beginning" Turned Chicago Nostalgia Into a Global Anthem

Some songs hit immediately. Others sit patiently in an album's tracklist, waiting for the world to catch up. "End of Beginning" by Djo is firmly in the second category, Ambo Fam, and its slow-burn rise is one of the most satisfying music stories of the past few years.

The track originally appeared as the sixth song on DECIDE, released on September 16, 2022. Produced by Djo alongside Adam Thein, it initially seemed like a deep cut on a synth-heavy album from an artist many listeners knew primarily as actor Joe Keery. Then, in early 2024, everything changed. A wave of TikTok virality sent streams of the song soaring, and on March 1, 2024, a full year and a half after the album dropped, "End of Beginning" was officially pushed as the fifth single from DECIDE. That is a remarkable gap between release and single treatment, and it tells you everything about how this song found its audience on its own terms.

A Homecoming Song Disguised as a Synth Pop Track

At its core, "End of Beginning" is a song about leaving a place and never fully escaping it. Keery has been open about the inspiration: he spent time in Chicago, attending DePaul University and playing in the band Post Animal, before relocating to Los Angeles after his breakout role in Stranger Things in 2016. The song is his reckoning with that departure.

As Genius notes in their song bio, drawing on a 2024 Variety interview, Keery said the song is "about what it means to grow up and look back at a section of your life and kind of yearn for that, but then also to have a deep appreciation for what happened" ^[1]. That tension, between yearning and gratitude, is exactly what makes the chorus land so hard.

The lyrics are deceptively simple. "And when I'm back in Chicago, I feel it / Another version of me, I was in it" is the kind of line that sounds casual until you realize how much it carries. It is the recognition that the person you were in a certain city no longer exists, and that visiting that city means meeting a ghost of yourself. Who among us has not walked through an old neighborhood and felt that exact vertigo?

The Bridge That Launched a Million Videos

If you have wondered why this song exploded in 2024, look no further than the bridge. "You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man" repeats like a mantra, and it became the soundtrack to countless videos of people returning to hometowns, revisiting old haunts, or simply reflecting on who they used to be. The lyric video posted by Dan Music in late February 2024 has since racked up over a million likes and tens of millions of views, a striking indicator of just how far the song traveled beyond its original album release ^[2].

Even the official upload on Djo's own channel tells the story: more than 323 million views on a track that was never intended to be the album's centerpiece. That number would be impressive for a lead single from a major pop star. For a track six on a psychedelic-tinged synth album, it is extraordinary.

There is a lesson here about how songs find people now. The old model said a label picks the hit, the radio plays it, and the public follows. "End of Beginning" inverted that completely. Listeners found it, attached their own memories to that bridge, and the industry scrambled to catch up. Keery even acknowledged the surge himself, sharing a demo of the song on Instagram in February 2024 as the streams climbed.

Small Details, Big Payoff

Part of what rewards repeat listens is the song's odd, almost theatrical structure. There are these little staged interruptions: "Enter, Troubadour: 'Remember twenty-four?'" and later "Enter, Caroline: 'Just trust me, you'll be fine.'" They read like stage directions in a play, brief cameos from voices in the narrator's life. It gives the song a documentary quality, like flipping through snapshots of a specific era. The Dan Music lyric video's own framing leans into this, describing the song as one about change, with the city and the transformed self at its center ^[2].

The production deserves more credit than it gets, too. Underneath the wistful lyrics is a propulsive, glossy synth arrangement that owes plenty to the 1980s. It is nostalgic music about nostalgia, form matching content. The song does not wallow. It moves, which is perhaps why it works so well as the soundtrack to homecoming videos rather than sad-boy wallowing.

Why It Resonates Right Now

I would argue "End of Beginning" hit in 2024 because it arrived at a cultural moment saturated with looking backward. The early 2020s have been defined by reassessment, people questioning where they live, what they do, and who they became during a few strange years. A song that explicitly waves goodbye to a former self, while admitting the city that shaped you never really leaves you, was always going to find a hungry audience.

There is also the Djo project itself to consider. Keery has been careful to separate the music from his acting fame, performing behind shaggy hair and sunglasses, letting the songs stand on their own. The fact that "End of Beginning" conquered the global charts on the strength of the song rather than the celebrity is a quiet vindication of that approach. It climbed all the way into the upper reaches of the global Top 50 without ever trading on his screen persona.

The song's live life has grown accordingly. Djo had actually been performing it since April 2022, debuting it at a show in Birmingham, Alabama, and playing it at Lollapalooza in Chicago that July, months before the album even came out. Fittingly, the Chicago festival crowd heard it first in the very city the song mourns. More recently, live versions from festival stages have drawn massive audiences of their own, confirming this is now a genuine singalong moment at shows.

A Goodbye Worth Repeating

"End of Beginning" is that rare thing: a song about closure that refuses to close. Every listen is another wave goodbye, and every wave goodbye somehow feels like a hello to a new listener. The track sat quietly in the middle of DECIDE for a year and a half before the world decided it mattered. That is not marketing. That is just a song doing its job, finding the people who needed it, one homesick scroll at a time.

Keep an ear out, Ambo Fam. Songs like this do not come along often, and when they do, they stay with you like the city you left behind.

Sources referenced: ^[1], ^[2], ^[3]