The Orphan the Poet the Block Party

There’s a sense of joy that resonates in the Orphan the Poet’s music, reflected in everything from the duo’s album titles (see: 2024 EP Eureka) to its sound, an almost universally upbeat amalgamation of indie, pop, and emo built around a eries of pogoing, fist-pumping choruses. 

And yet, beneath this shimmering surface exist deep reserves of ennui, David Eselgroth singing: “My world’s getting dark”; “Drown out the world ending”; “Feelin’ good but could be better.”

“I think we’re both generally positive people, but there’s always this yearning for more,” said Jake Floyd, who will join bandmate Eselgroth in headlining the inaugural Walnut Street Block Party on Saturday, Oct. 24, joined by Joey Aich and Liteweight Champion. (Tickets for the event, which will take place on the stage at the rear of Sweeney’s Tavern, are only $5.) “So, on the positive side, things are good, but we’re always chasing something. I don’t know. I just feel like for a lot of us, you’re always hoping for something around the next corner. … And I think generally our natural state of songwriting is that we’re the underdogs, the outsiders.”

Floyd traced this pull to the years the two spent growing up in small town Ohio; Eselgroth is from Greenfield south of Chillicothe, while Floyd was raised northwest of Dayton in Minster, Ohio, which he described as “a seven-stoplight town” roughly a square mile in size.

“The closest music venue was more than an hour away, so it always felt like, even within Ohio, we grew up on the outside looking in,” said Floyd, who attributed his early love for music to having been raised by parents who provided a running soundtrack throughout his childhood. “My dad drove a flatbed truck, and whenever I would ride with him, we used to play this radio game. I don’t know if you remember this, and maybe this is dating me a bit, but remember the ‘scan’ button, where it would play five seconds of each radio station? We would always try to guess the artists and see who could get it faster as it was skipping through [the dial].”

Years later, this genre hopping has become a key element to the music Floyd makes alongside Eselgroth in the Orphan the Poet, the two rarely working with a specific project in mind, instead amassing songs as they come and allowing the creative muse to serve as their guide. Asked, for instance, if the two were currently working toward a new album with Eureka having been released more than two years ago, Floyd demurred, acknowledging that while the two are always recording that it wasn’t necessarily a focus at the moment.

“We try not to be like, ‘This is super exactly what we’re doing,’” he said. “If I pulled out my computer, I would have a DropBox file of half-finished songs, demos, things that we’re constantly working towards. But we tend to keep our little racehorse blinders on and keep moving forward. And so, right now we’re working on the Block Party. But once that’s done, we’re on to the next thing, and we’re on to recording. And when we feel it’s ready to put out, it’ll get put out.”

The idea for the Block Party extended from a concert the Orphan the Poet played at Natalie’s Grandview earlier this year where the tickets sold out more than two weeks in advance – an experience that left Floyd both pleasantly dumbfounded and wondering what the band could possibly do for an encore.

“Something like that had never happened to us before. … And we started to think about bigger venues we could play, and then it was like, ‘What if we did something outdoors?’” said Floyd, who took additional inspiration from the hometown concert Manchester Orchestra stages in Atlanta each year. “Every Thanksgiving they do this thing called ‘The Stuffing,’ which is basically a big concert with all of their friends. And we were like, oh man, what if we put this thing on every year? Hopefully this is the first one, and then every year we can just blow it out with our friends and make it affordable for everyone.”