Slow Joy Has Never Sounded More Like Himself.
Slow Joy has always sounded like Esteban Flores trying to make sense of the space between heaviness and release. On his new (kind of) self-titled record, that tension feels sharper than ever, but so does his sense of control over it.
– WORDS BY CJ / PHOTOS COURTESY OF SLOW JOY
On Esteban Flores, he plays every instrument himself and leans deeper into the sounds that shaped him. What comes out the other side is an album that feels less like a reinvention and more like a clearer picture of who Slow Joy has been all along. Putting his own name on the record makes that idea even more explicit.
There was also a practical reason for using his own name: people still seem to think Slow Joy is a band.
“I always get a little bit of shit online,” he says. “People think I’m a band and not a solo project. Sometimes people will yell at me and be like, ‘I can’t believe you don’t show any of the other band members.’”
Calling the record Esteban Flores became a way of answering that without overexplaining it. There are no hidden members of Slow Joy. There is Flores, and on this record, more than ever, there is very little distance between him and the music.
“Usually I’ll hire drummers,” he says. “This time I played every single instrument on it. So it is the most me. I think it’s pretty fitting.”
Across the record, Slow Joy feels heavier, more hypnotic and more interested in pushing against the melancholy that has always sat close to the center of Flores’ songwriting. The subject matter can still get dark, but increasingly the music around it refuses to stay there.
Flores thinks of that tension almost visually.
“If there’s no contrast, you won’t see the difference between the two things,” he says. “If it’s just a whole painting of black ink, you’re not gonna see the intricacies. You need brevity to make the darkness be more felt.” He doesn’t want to abandon someone inside the worst feeling in a song. Instead, he looks for its emotional center and builds the contrast around it.
On this record, some of that comes through a new rhythmic weight. The drums push forward more insistently. Guitars smear into each other. Songs settle into repetitions that can feel almost trance-like. Mention My Bloody Valentine and Flores immediately laughs.
“This is my Kevin Shields era.”
It turns out that comparison is considerably less accidental than it might first appear. “You’re the first one to pick up on it,” he says. “I thought it was gonna be right in everybody’s face.”
Flores listened to a lot of My Bloody Valentine while making the record, alongside artists like Beach House, absorbing pieces of shoegaze without ever trying to make a shoegaze album. Even one of the record’s most important pieces of equipment came with a direct connection: a Keeley pedal designed in collaboration with Shields.
“The most valuable player on that entire record was this pedal,” he says. “It is like the My Bloody Valentine pedal. I used that so much literally just because I loved it.” The influence reaches the vocals too. Flores’ wife sings throughout the album, adding higher layers inspired in part by My Bloody Valentine’s blurred male-female vocal interplay.
On “I Lied,” he went further, bringing in Christine from Pool Kids after realizing the melody needed a voice he didn’t think he could give it. “I had written that song, and the verse melody is just beautiful, but I just wasn’t nailing it vocally,” Flores says. “I wanted to hear it sung by a better singer.”
It’s a surprising admission from someone whose voice is so central to Slow Joy, but Flores is specific about the limitation rather than falsely modest about it. The part sat in an area of his falsetto he didn’t love. “I thought someone with a really good head voice would do well,” he says. “Christine had a particularly beautiful one.”
For all the additional texture across the record, there is one moment where Flores deliberately removes the contrast entirely. “I Don’t Need Anything From You,” the closing track, ends suddenly. No comedown, no transition into whatever Spotify has decided should play next. It simply stops.
“That song was so longing and so angry,” he says. “Being in my 30s now, I’m very aware that it’s never just the other person’s fault. But I just wanted to write a song where it was completely angry and just feeling the feeling.” So he leaves the listener there.
“I thought the best way to end it was just leaving the listener in that feeling.” It makes the end of the album feel strangely confrontational in a time when records can disappear seamlessly into playlists. Flores likes that it interrupts the expected flow.
“The point is to jar you out of the normalcy of records.” Playing drums himself also changed something Flores hadn’t necessarily expected: how he thinks about Slow Joy as a live band.
After spending much of the last year on tour, he noticed older songs could begin to bleed into one another onstage. Slow Joy has always moved between melancholy and driving indie rock, but night after night, Flores began hearing the need for more separation. “I realized from playing a lot of these songs I had to start bringing more color into what I was doing,” he says.
PHOTO BY ANDREW SHERMAN
The live show used to be something he considered after a song was written. Now it has started creeping into the writing itself.
“As I was playing the drums I could feel what the tempo feels like and what the energy of the song will feel like,” he says. “The live experience, I just had it at the forefront of my head.”
Drums were one of Flores’ first instruments, learned around the same time as guitar, but eventually became something he didn’t need to take seriously. Recording this album brought him back to them. Now when he gets to the studio, he’ll often spend the first 45 minutes simply playing.
“I don’t put anything else in,” he says. “I just enjoy it.”
Touring has also changed Flores’ relationship with Dallas.
Slow Joy played JAMBALOO during the festival’s first year, but Flores says he didn’t initially experience the traditional hometown-band trajectory. He wasn’t deeply embedded in a scene when the project began. Plenty of listeners didn’t even know where he was from.
Only after playing everywhere else did Dallas start to feel different.
“There’s nothing like it,” he says. “There’s a few cities that are just super special to me, and Dallas is one of those cities where I was like, ‘Oh wow, it actually is like a hometown. All of these people are here. We’re all experiencing this together.’”
He recently put it even more simply to fans on Discord. “If I could make every show feel like a Dallas show, I think I’d be content.” That same Discord is part of the other life that comes with Slow Joy getting bigger: the perpetual online version of being a musician.
Flores admits it can be exhausting. A post that goes nowhere can ruin your day if you let it. Something he spends hours making can fail to connect and immediately send him into wondering whether anyone cares anymore. But he has little patience for pretending that posting videos is some great indignity inflicted on artists.
“I always say, go to where the people are,” he says. “The art is for the people, so I’m gonna make something to where people will find it. That’s really my job.”
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Flores is a second-generation American and comes, as he puts it, from a long line of blue-collar workers. His grandfather was a contractor. That perspective cuts through some of the romantic complaints about what musicians should or shouldn’t have to do.
“Far be it from me to complain about having to make a TikTok.”
He knows the ideal version of being an artist would involve making exactly what you want, putting it into the world and remaining completely untouched by how it performs. He also knows that isn’t how anyone’s brain actually works.
“Sometimes I spend a lot of time on something I’m proud of and it doesn’t really connect, and then I’m just like, ‘Ah, I’m washed. Nobody cares.’”
“It’s just a thing you gotta always fight against.”
Maybe that is why a self-titled Slow Joy record makes so much sense right now. More of Flores has made it onto this one than ever before: the drummer, the shoegazer, the songwriter trying to bring more color into dark places, the touring musician discovering what home feels like, and the guy who still assumes every new record might be the one nobody listens to.
He keeps making them anyway.
