Slow Joy - Esteban Flores

Slow Joy was always Esteban Flores. From early successes like “Soft Slam” and “Crawling,” Flores introduced the project with his most personal writing, songs meant to parse a difficult, transformative passage of life. Though with acclaim also came the sense that Slow Joy had become something else, an entity outside of Flores. When his sophomore album began to cohere, Flores knew it was time to make something that was the purest representation of his interests and concerns yet. Esteban Flores was almost preordained — a self-titled record bearing not Slow Joy’s name, but the name of the man behind everything you hear across the album.

The Carlsbad, New Mexico native had been living in Dallas for seven years when Slow Joy blossomed out of loss and confusion. As he entered his thirties, Flores was laid off and his mother passed away. Slow Joy was the conduit in which he could process not only his grief but all the listlessness that comes with getting older and realizing life didn’t look how you expected it would. Early singles popped off on TikTok, Flores abandoned the corporate ladder to pursue music full-time, and he soon established himself with the 2024 EP Mi Amigo Slow Joy and his 2025 debut album A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’ s Coming. The album met critical acclaim and commercial success as tracks like “Gruesome” hit alternative radio, and listeners celebrated the Mexican-American representation Flores brought to the rock space. Yet for Flores, something was still missing. He wanted to make something stranger, messier, something more him.

“If Esteban Flores was the last record I wrote, I’d be really proud,” Flores says. “I said everything I wanted to say.”

Following the pressure of his debut, Flores located a freedom that, conversely, yielded a sharper focus. Always writing, Flores soon found his sophomore outing tightening narratively, emotionally, and compositionally. “It came from everything I learned on the last album, but also going back to everything that made me fall in love with Slow Joy in the first place,” Flores says. Known for his blend of shoegaze, emo, and alt-rock, Flores chased a darker, heavier iteration of his aesthetic derived from post-rock and new infatuations with classic bands like Nirvana and Pixies.

“I missed the wall of sound, the noise,” he continues. “I will always be a verse-chorus guy, but I wanted to mess with it. I wanted it to be so me you couldn’t recreate it.”

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