Dublin quartet Inhaler may have already clocked up a UK chart topper in their 2021 debut It Won’t Always Be Like This and a silver podium place with its follow-up, 2023’s Cuts & Bruises, but in more personal ways, says 25-year-old frontman Elijah Hewson, this month’s third act, Open Wide, feels like a new beginning.
“I think there was definitely a lot of anxiety on the first two albums. It was so stressful. We’d never been in a studio before, we had to get on tour, we had to finish the singles. It was very highly strung whereas I think in this one we had an opportunity to go back to…” he pauses. “There was a deadline, but it was more about not stressing about that stuff. It was a real joy to make. I think that made a huge difference to me.”
You sense the place that the vocalist’s mind is harking back to was that of a simpler time, when the band — completed by bassist Robert Keating, guitarist Josh Bartholomew Jenkinson and drummer Ryan McMahon — were just a bunch of teenagers, dropping out of the city’s St Andrew’s College to pursue their collective musical dream.
Since drip-feeding a string of early singles in 2019 and gaining public attention soon after (in no small part due to Hewson’s father, Paul — or as he’s otherwise known, Bono), the momentum around Inhaler has been swift and constant. In 2020, they placed fifth on the BBC’s annual Sound Of poll and, alongside writing and recording their first two LPs, they’ve barely stopped touring since the pandemic; in 2023 alone, Inhaler opened up for Harry Styles, Pearl Jam, Arctic Monkeys and Sam Fender on top of their own headline dates.
“There was definitely a lot of anxiety on the first two albums”
You could argue — and many have — that the wealth of opportunities afforded early on to the band were wrapped up in the vocalist’s family connections but, nepotism or not, it’s hard to imagine any group of 20-year-old mates turning down the chance to support Noel Gallagher, or sign to Polydor.
Now half a decade on and with the benefit of hindsight, however, Inhaler have been doing some reassessing. “I think we were very eager to say ‘yes’ to everything, and maybe the music was … not left by the wayside, but if I could go back and do something different I probably would have waited to put out the first album until we had felt more confident within ourselves,” Hewson suggests. “I love the songs and I love that album so much — it’s made our lives really — but I do hear people trying to figure out what the f*** they’re doing.”
“We had a great team around us and people really helped us along the way and maybe did too much for us?” McMahon admits. “There was almost a lack of focus on what we wanted to be and more of a focus on how we were gonna get to a certain place. We thought about the live show, and what would connect, and did a lot of things that weren’t very personal to us as a band. I think we just had a lot of learning to do.”
In terms of pushing them up the rankings into a genuine breakthrough success story, Inhaler’s tactics worked. This week, they’ll play two nights at Brixton Academy to a total of 10,000 people before setting off on a world tour that will see them through until summer. But having given themselves a period of time off, returning to their teenage rehearsal room to write before recording their third album in a focused chunk for the first time ever, Open Wide finds Inhaler regarding themselves in a different light. “I don’t think we take ourselves seriously sometimes. We don’t feel like artists at all, we just feel like we get on stage and play music,” says McMahon. “So it was good to remind ourselves that we have that in us.”
Inhaler's Playlist
⬤ Pixies, Letter to Memphis McMahon: “They reshaped my way of thinking about what music could sound like and really wiped the slate of limitations clean.”
⬤ LCD Soundsystem, Dance Yrself Clean Jenkinson: “This is arguably my favourite song of all time.”
⬤ Scustin, Charmer Keating: “It’s the most recent single from Irish band Scustin. I love the funk yet modern pop feel.”
⬤ Tom Petty, Mary Jane’s Last Dance Hewson: “I love the sound of his voice on top of his guitar playing, it sounds like melting tarmac on a freeway.”
⬤ Cocteau Twins, Heaven or Las Vegas McMahon: “I first heard this song when I was 16 and fell so effortlessly in love with it.”
Having been put in touch via one of Styles’s bandmates after their support date, celebrated producer Kid Harpoon (who’s also been behind hits for Florence + the Machine and Miley Cyrus’s gargantuan Flowers) was enlisted to lend his touch to the record. Providing an “instinctive” antidote to the band’s self-described tendency to overwork and agonise over studio decisions, his A-list credentials also lit a fire under Inhaler to really knuckle down.
“The constant fear of him going, ‘You know what, Harry wants to do a little acoustic album in the south of France, I’m gonna dip…’ was always on our minds,” Keating laughs. The pairing also points to the Dubliners’ increasing willingness to fully lean into their pop side. Where their opening moves saw the quartet largely labelled an indie band, Open Wide is unashamed in its bold, commercial choruses and wish for wider connection; first single Your House is essentially glam-rock by way of Take That.
“I think we’ve always felt like a pop band”
“I think we’ve always felt like a pop band,” says Hewson. “You can be like, ‘Oh I don’t care if anybody likes it’, but I think you’re probably lying to yourself. When we see people like Harry or Arctic Monkeys going out on stage and they’ve got this massive amount of connection going on — for me, that’s very attractive and I look up to that. That’s the dream, to do something you love that resonates with lots of people, so in that way, we’re not afraid of pop music.”
Inhaler are also evidently not afraid of hard work and taking the job seriously. They’ve never been ones for drinking in the studio and their tour environment is, by all accounts, a modest and mature operation. “We’re quite well-behaved, we’ve not woken up on a chandelier, yet…” Hewson notes. “For me, I’m quite an introvert and I find being on tour — the social aspect of it — quite daunting. I don’t really like to go out.” Is the life of a young rock’n’roll band in 2025 all a far cry from the 1980s glory years of U2’s early days? “From what I understand, they were similar. They didn’t drink until their mid-thirties really, heavily, because I think they kinda knew it was their one shot and they didn’t wanna mess it up. I think we think the same about it,” he suggests before chuckling: “But yeah, sometimes I am like … where’s the f***ing limousine?!”
Open Wide might come co-signed by a pop powerhouse on the production desk, but away from any celebrity tie-ins — new or familial — the real magic of Inhaler clearly lies in the four close friends at its centre and the group they’ve been nurturing now for a decade. “I’ve always just felt like the band is the place for expression,” says Hewson. “In secondary school, I thought I was gonna have a much harder time of it than I actually did, and then I met these guys. When it’s us four, I don’t need anything outside that.”
Inhaler play Brixton Academy, February 13 & 14, ticketmaster.co.uk; Open Wide is out now
