Culture
Esteban Flores talks about the symbolic figures at the heart of Slow Joy’s debut full length album
By: Henry Day
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COLUMBUS, Ohio (WOUB) – Slow Joy is the solo project of Esteban Flores, who uses powerful alternative rock arrangements to explore themes of bliss, grief, and the overwhelming chaos of the world.
Since 2020, Flores has released three EPs and numerous singles, steadily building momentum toward his debut album, A Joy So Slow at Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming. He’s been touring both coasts of the U.S. in anticipation of the release.
Flores spoke with WOUB about life on the road, his upcoming album, and the emotional core of his music. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Henry Day: Was it always your intention to release the tracks Wound and Gruesome as singles?
Esteban: When I initially finished the album, I realized that I still had just a little bit more left in me, so I decided to go to the studio for a week in El Paso, TX and really try to get a few more songs for the album that I think really deserved to be on there. From that experience, we came out with Gruesome and Wound, and I just knew that those songs were going to be singles from the time we recorded. That was always the intention of them. Lyrically they deal with very different things. The whole album has this theme, I was picturing a small town, just the stories of each individual person, what they’re dealing with, and things along those lines.
The music videos for ‘Gruesome’ and ‘Wound’ seem connected—one ends with a bag over your head, and the next begins that way. Was that a planned concept to link the videos into a larger story, or did that connection come from collaborating with the filmmakers?
Esteban: Everything is connected. So from the start of the album we created these characters. One of ’em is a sugar skull, which kind of represents the fear of death, and one of ’em is a bull, which is wild and kind of represents life and all of that. I wanted these characters to be emblematic of dealing with the craziness and chaos of life. You’re always dealing with your grief. It never goes away and you’re always dealing with life. It’s always wild. It’s always intense and it’s always going to be there.
In the music videos, these characters and their loyal servants kidnap me and force me to play Gruesome to them, then I end up in another place where they’re forcing me to play another song for them, and you just start to recognize that these things may not actually exist. It might just be like a figment of my imagination. I’ve always had the intention of connecting everything.
The new characters look great—I love the visual direction. Did you design them yourself, or were you collaborating with sculptors or someone else?
Esteban: I hired a really fantastic artist out of El Paso and Juarez, TX. He crafted the skull and the bull. We knew we wanted those specifically, but he really took it to the next level. It was definitely a collaborative effort on the stylizing. He was just a fantastic artist and really nailed it. I wanted him to be a sort of living effigy walking around and having this ominous presence.
The biggest thing for me is that they’re ominous. The bull is the female presenting character. It’s wild. It’s just the beauty of life and how crazy life can be, and so I love the fact that both the bull and the skull linger along throughout the imagery on this album, because those things are always with me.
Slowjoy was started out of going through grief counseling and dealing with those tough emotions. The skull character, which represents the grieving process around it – it really reminds me of what this thing (Slowjoy) came from. Then in addition, adding the bull character, which is this wild and free version of life. With them together. It really just shows where I’ve been and where I’m going and they’re always there. It’s always lingering. They’re always these ominous, scary creatures that exist, but, as you’ll see as the story progresses, they’re just always there.
Have you worked those sculpted masks into the live show at all, or is that solely for music video and promotional images and stuff like that?
Esteban: We will more as the album comes out, it’s all throughout the imagery on the tours, the merch and everything. We’ll definitely get more of that as we keep going. Right now we only have the two masks and we still have a few more videos to finish, so I don’t want to risk it getting exploded yet.
Oh yeah. Don’t have someone throw a can of beer at it or anything like that.
Esteban: Yeah, exactly. Makes me think about a horror story from Arcade Fire’s Reflektor tour. They all had those gigantic masks and someone stole one of ’em and they just couldn’t use them for the rest of the tour. These aren’t leaving my house unless we need to use them.
Keep ’em behind lock and key for sure. I wanted to congratulate you on your album coming up on May 18. It’s a really exciting time to be an artist and debut your album. I was wondering if either the process of recording the album felt different to you, or if it was a similar process?
Esteban: Yeah, I’m such a singles person. I love The Beatles, they have albums and albums full of singles. I really wanted to do that, it is much easier to do that when you have four songs on an EP, or one song as a single. So when I was making an album, it was kind of daunting because I just kept trying to beat every song in a way that made me kind of go crazy at first.
It took a little bit for me to catch my legs again and recognize the fact that this is the album, this is the process. I’m not going to change it just because there’s more songs, but also how do we make these songs make sense together as opposed to just a collection of wild ideas? I think it ended up in a really good spot. The iterations always become what you want them to be eventually, and some of the songs I thought were going to be the lead singles ended up being album tracks and some of these album tracks became lead singles.