New York, NY – May 16, 2025 – Out today via Mick Music, A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming marks the powerful debut album from Slow Joy — the project of Dallas-based, New Mexican-born Chicano artist Esteban Flores — Listen HERE. To celebrate the album’s release, Flores is doing a special pop up event and performance in Dallas tonight at Spinster Records at 8pm – RSVP HERE.
A sweeping introduction to one of alternative music’s most vital new voices, the album offers a deeply personal and emotionally charged journey through themes of grief, identity, and resilience, all shaped by Flores’s experience as a Mexican-American artist. “A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming is my first album in my entire life,” says Flores. “It’s a celebration of the complexities of life drawing from all the colors of emotion. From ecstatic to disparaging, from lighthearted to dark, the album is everything I wanted my debut to be. It’s meant to be listened to from start to finish and take you on a journey through the stories of life, love, and grief.”
The focus track going into the album release, “Te Amo,” premiered yesterday via a First Listen feature on FLOOD Magazine — read and listen HERE. One of the most affecting moments on the album, the song channels Flores’s Mexican-American pride into a gut-punch rocker built around a deeply personal voice memo. “It was inspired by a voice memo with my grandma teaching me how to say te amo properly,” he explains. He shouts the phrase as the song rages on, each refrain like a promise on vinyl wax to make his grandmother proud.
“Te Amo” follows the release of previous singles “Here For You,” “Gruesome,” and “Wound,” all of which showcase Slow Joy’s signature mix of shoegaze textures, grunge bite, and emotional punk sensibilities. Produced by Mike Sapone (Oso Oso, The Front Bottoms) and recorded at Ghost Hit Recording in Springfield, MA and Sonic Ranch in El Paso, TX, the album continues Slow Joy’s striking visual narrative. Flores’s recurring masked characters — the Bull and the Sugar Skull — embody chaos and grief, appearing throughout the album art and music videos as evolving reflections of the emotional world behind the songs.
Slow Joy is emerging as a singular force in independent music. With A Joy So Slow At Times I Don’t Think It’s Coming, Flores offers a raw, resonant debut that refuses to flinch from life’s hardest moments — and finds beauty in the breakdown.
