When Esteban released their debut EP on 1st September 2008, Tom Robinson at BBC 6 Music claimed “There’s no-one like them out there”. Their world music infused rock and socially aware lyrics won them a legion of early supporters. The band gave permission to Fairtrade Foundation to use their track ‘Say It Loud’ in various Fairtrade campaigns.
They teamed up with Plan UK to sponsor a child and his community in La Paz, Honduras. Carjack Streets, the iPhone game, featured the band’s music and Total Guitar Magazine wrote about their “finger-style funk” as a “world explosion”. Single ‘She’s Just A Girl’ was used in a global campaign by Esteban’s favoured NGO Plan UK highlighting the issues faced by girls in the world’s poorest countries because of their lack of access to education and legal rights.
The next two years were spent in a whirlwind in and out of the recording studio between tours, interviews and festivals. The popular Beach Break Live saw Esteban share the stage with Dizzee Rascal and The Zutons.
By summer of 2010, ‘The Dirty Wrecked Tour’, named after their yet-to-be-released debut album, had taken Esteban to over 315 appearances throughout the UK. The band, drained and unable to carry on, had to concede that the party had taken its toll.
The album ‘Dirty Wrecked’ was officially released on 3rd January 2011 and the band never returned to the www.
Nearly a decade later, the four musicians began to truly appreciate the spiritual founding moment of the band in the aftermath of the 2002 Bali bombings, when, as young men who had narrowly avoided death, they decided that life was too short to spend on anything but music.
In November 2019, Esteban recorded a new album titled Jackpot Motel. Cut entirely live with no click tracks, Jackpot Motel is a joyful blast of life-affirming funk that borrows from world music, latin rhythms and rock, is made for dancing, cares about the environment and sounds like the perfect soundtrack to a trip across the deserts of your mind
