Q&A: Slow Joy Honors His Roots in Stunning Debut Album “A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming”
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
A JOY THAT CRAWLS — There’s a weight to the title A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming—it reads like a lived-in truth. It’s not a metaphor. It’s a lived experience, stretched across years of waiting, grieving, and holding out for something—anything—to change. On his debut full-length album, Dallas-based Chicano artist Esteban Flores, known as Slow Joy, doesn’t chase happiness. He sifts through the stillness, the wreckage, and the slow-burning hope that something beautiful might one day emerge from it.
Before Dallas, there was Carlsbad. A desert town famous for the Carlsbad Caverns, where ancient rock formations draw tourists but not touring bands, Carlsbad is where Slow Joy first wrestled with the paradox of hope in a place defined by stillness. “In a small town, you’re just waiting and waiting for something good to happen,” he says. “You wonder, I don't think something good could ever happen.”
At the core of A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming lies a vulnerability that refuses to be limited. Grief, identity, and resilience are explored with emotional clarity, and Slow Joy’s genre-blurring approach mirrors the complexity of his story. Fusing elements of shoegaze, post-rock, and indie balladry, Slow Joy builds immersive worlds that thrum with tension and tenderness. The album's emotional core lies in its refusal to rush resolution. Slow Joy writes like someone who has sat with grief long enough to learn its language. Tracks like “Do I Wear You Out” illuminate the fragility of human connection, while “Crawl III”—the conclusion to a trilogy dedicated to his late mother—cements his music as an open letter to loss and lineage.
Yet Slow Joy’s story isn’t told only through lyrics or riffs. It’s visual, too—woven through the mythos of masked figures that reappear throughout the album’s artwork and music videos. In “Here For You,” the Bull and the Sugar Skull return once more, their presence less mythological than metaphorical. Pulled from Mexican cultural iconography, these characters act as specters of memory and guardians of emotion, evolving across each chapter to reflect the ever-shifting terrain of Slow Joy’s psyche.
What makes A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming resonate so deeply is not just its catharsis, but its insistence on being grounded. Slow Joy doesn’t run from his roots—he amplifies them. As a Chicano artist, his work pulses with cultural specificity, but its emotional reach is universal.
As he prepares to tour the record through 2025 and beyond, Slow Joy carries more than songs. He carries his heritage, his hometown, and a message for anyone who’s ever waited in the dark for something good to happen: it might not come fast, but it’s coming.
LUNA: Welcome back and thank you for talking to Luna again. It's super exciting to have you back since the last time we talked about your EP Mi Amigo Slow Joy. I would love to catch up and see how life has been treating you and what you’ve been up to?
SLOW JOY: Life's been treating me great just getting ready for this album to come out, and it's my first album, so I'm starting to realize that there's a lot of work that goes into building an expansive world and just trying to do it the right way. I constantly say, I don't know if I'll ever get another one of these, so I'm trying to do it right.
LUNA: How do you feel your music has evolved since the Mi Amigo Slow Joy EP and what can listeners expect from you in this new era of music and storytelling?
SLOW JOY: It's a little bit more poignant. It's a little bit more vast. I stopped chasing any genres, and just started chasing what I loved, which is an all encompassing rock approach, but the album itself, like with lyrics, I've always been really personal with my lyrics, and I've always been really intent on making sure that it's not just a love song. They're all just really real to me. I feel like listeners can expect really honest music.
LUNA: You are releasing your debut album A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming and huge congratulations! What themes or emotions did you find yourself returning to most while writing this record? Were there any unexpected ones that revealed themselves during the process?
SLOW JOY: The whole thing was unexpected, to be honest with you. I've never made an album in my life. I kept picturing my hometown of Carlsbad, New Mexico, and I kept thinking about small towns like that, you really don't get to hide much. Everything is everywhere. Everybody goes with their own problems, their own stories. I kept seeing this town as a home for these songs and these stories of the songs that affected me. A lot of it happens there, and the songs that are maybe not just about me, but a story is usually based on characters within that town and that was an interesting theme that I kept. I didn't chase. It just happened. It was cool to have a an anchor
LUNA: What is your favorite song from A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming and why do you love it? Is there a certain lyric or message that stands out to you the most?
SLOW JOY: That's tough. I think “Crawl III” is one of my favorites. I really like the slow ones. That song is really important to me, because it finishes off the trilogy, and personally, I think it's some of the best lyrical work that I've gotten to be a part of. It goes directly into what I wanted to say dealing with my mom passing away and subverts the other two where the other two are these heavy songs. This one's more melancholic—just guitar and vocals. I really enjoyed working on that one.
LUNA: How did your approach to this album differ from Mi Amigo Slow Joy? Did you feel more freedom—or more pressure—this time around?
SLOW JOY: A lot more pressure, as I've done a bunch of EPs in my life, so it was less daunting and I tried to overwrite. I have a four song EP. I wrote like eight to 10 songs for that, and then picked the best ones. When you do that with a 13 song album, you end up writing 30-something songs. It was daunting, because I just wanted it to be good. I wanted to be great and it was really scary, because it's just a big body of work. You listen to these, these monolithic albums, and you think how did someone do that? And once you realize it's all the same flow state, you get there and you follow what your tastes are. It makes the creation process a little bit less scary.
LUNA: Were there any specific moments where you felt you were creatively taking a risk—whether sonically, lyrically or visually?
SLOW JOY: For “Gruesome,” the new, tough guy, post-punk sound was very scary, because I really cut my teeth on this almost shoegaze kind of sound. A lot of the fans really love that. I just thought it would be so cool to pretend like you're the toughest guy while singing not very tough lyrics over a post-punk song. I really loved it and it paid off. This is the first song that I've ever had on radio, so it worked out really well.
LUNA: What did the creative process for this album look like? How did the songs evolve from their earliest sketches to the final versions we’ll hear?
SLOW JOY: I usually start off just just writing with an acoustic guitar, be it with some friends or by myself. If it doesn't sound good acoustic, then it's not going to sound good anywhere else. I usually will stop at the first chorus, so it will be like a verse, pre-chorus, chorus, and then I just let it sit for a while. Then after doing a bunch of those, I'll come back to it and see if it still makes me feel the same way that it did. I don't finish songs that don't instantly excite me.
LUNA: I would love to touch on the visual storytelling for this record. The “Here For You” video continues the visual narrative established in previous releases, featuring the recurring masked characters. The Bull and the Sugar Skull have become powerful visual anchors in your work. When did you first conceptualize them, and how have they evolved alongside your music?
SLOW JOY: I've wanted to do that for a while. I love larger than life characters and creating those within a world where they exist but they're not fully anthropomorphic. When they're not human. They're not talking very much. I've loved the idea of putting things into symbolism, almost like an effigy. With the sugar skull, and a lot of my music, I deal with grief, and it's just a thing that's always there. That representation was pretty easy. The bull is just the wildness of life. Bulls are really big in Chicano culture. I have a bull tattooed on me and it’s an animal that we find a lot of closeness and meaning to. I thought that was a perfect duality, so that you have the skull and then you have the bulls, so the one's death and one's life.
LUNA: Has building this visual world influenced the way you write your songs—do images or scenes come to you first, or does the music lead?
SLOW JOY: The music led. I finished the music before I got on to that. I want the record to tell me what it wants to be before I go. But now these are staying with me, so we'll see how it affects the releases in the future.
LUNA: Are you planning on continuing this type of visual storytelling and having these characters evolve with your future releases?
SLOW JOY: You want to hold on to things forever. My first EP was me in a luchador mask. The other characters in the story all wear luchador masks. It's something that you just carry on. I think this is an all encompassing story. And these aren't new ideas. These are things that have been with my culture for years, so I don't think it's going to age out. I think it's a thing that will stay with me.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would love to share with Luna?
SLOW JOY: Touring, touring, touring. I take off at the end of this summer. When I first come back from tour, I can't wait to just do nothing, and then it takes me a couple of days before I feel like I need to get out of the house. I'm really excited to get back out there.
