DECIDE Song Sorter

About DECIDE

DECIDE dropped in September 2022, three years after Twenty Twenty, and it's the album that got most people to Djo. Keery and Adam Thein started it in 2019 and carried on through lockdown, passing Ableton sessions back and forth over screen share. He's said watching The Beatles: Get Back helped him, and that he wanted to stop editing himself the way he had on the debut.

They wrote and produced it together and recorded it in late 2021 at The Sound Factory in Los Angeles. The guitars mostly went away. It's synth-pop and synthwave, and Keery has said that once he stopped worrying about playing the songs live, the synth-pop influences opened up. Change came first in June, then Gloom, Figure You Out and Half Life. Runner opens the album, Half Life sounds like it was made for a Blade Runner sequel, and On and On is about scrolling your life away.

And then there's End of Beginning. He's said it's a tribute to Chicago, where he went to college and first played music seriously, and to the simpler time before Stranger Things. In 2024 it went viral on TikTok, debuted on the Hot 100 at number 51 and reached the top 10 there, peaking at number 6. It also hit number 4 in the UK that year, and in January 2026 it finally got to number one there, for two weeks. A slow burner, to put it mildly.

Reviews were mostly good - Metacritic has it at 77 from six reviews, though Pitchfork thought the songwriting didn't have enough personality of its own.

It's 13 songs with no deluxe, about three minutes.