“It’s weird because none of us are joyous… at all” Inhaler are making brighter music in darker times
Dublin-based contemporary rock band Inhaler set out to create a “timeless, brighter sound” with their latest record, Open Wide. “We just seem to make music that gives off that joyous, happy feeling,” says guitarist Josh Jenkinson. “Which is weird because none of us are joyous… at all.”
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This candid statement swiftly captures Jenkinson’s sardonic disposition. He’s joined by lead singer Elijah Hewson, over Zoom, following the bands recent performance at Lollapalooza Brazil and two legs of tour in support of the new record. Inhaler is rounded out by Robert “Bobby” Keating on bass and Ryan McMahon on drums.
Hewson, who, inadvertently, recently sparked an online TikTok trend following a sickly performance of Open Wide track Billy (Yeah Yeah Yeah), provided a more concrete opinion. He uses These Are The Days – a colossal and instantly magnetic modern rock opus off their 2023 album Cuts & Bruises – to provide an example to supply additional context.
“Being in the studio, it’s easy to fall out of love with your work after you labor on it for so long,” he says. “We always want to move onto the next thing. That song, in retrospect, so many people ask for it. Which is bizarre to us, because it’s like, ‘Yeah, but have you heard X-Ray off the new album?’” His smile gleans as he asserts the playful dig.
Image: Inhaler
Open Wide tracks such as Your House, The Charms, and, most distinctly and impressively, Concrete, preserve emphasis on the poppier elements of the project. Elsewhere, tunes such as Even Though, Again, X-Ray, and A Question Of You offer grittier, riff-and-vocal fry-centric components. Thematically, the record saw Hewson aim to be more forthcoming of the lyrical content, centered around in-the-moment reflections of his musings as opposed to character studies.
Kid Harpoon, most recently awarded for his contributions to Grammy winning megahits Flowers by Miley Cyrus and As It Was by Harry Styles, served as executive producer of the record. The band sought to “cast the net out” to others, though ultimately chose Harpoon due to his work on King Of Leon’s 2024 record, Can We Please Have Fun, among other factors.
“The Kings of Leon album was the big pointer, but we write pop songs,” Hewson says. “An understanding of that was important. Kid Harpoon’s guitar knowledge, and all the gear he used in the studio, was very impressive. He’s recording stuff through a VHS camera and takin’ the audio off. I don’t want to give away his secrets, but he had this modular synth he was trying to figure out. It was like watching a scientist.”
Harpoon’s “obsession,” as Hewson put it, with Deftones’ seminal 2000 record White Pony is evident across Hewson’s stylistic vocal choices, McMahon’s drums, and overall sonics of the record, despite the band entering the sessions with the lyrical content of the songs finalized, made its way onto Open Wide. Fragments of White Pony’s less-imposing songs like Knife Prty, Teenager, and Pink Maggit could certainly be feasible touchpoints.
For Hewson and Jenkinson, their process is nearly symbiotic. “We’d come up with a demo and I’d interpolate whatever was going on on it,” Jenkinson says. “Without even saying, ‘You do this, I’ll do this,’ we naturally end up playin’ our parts. Some songs Eli is lead, some I’m the lead. We’ve done it for so long that we wouldn’t know any other way of making guitar parts other than bouncing off what’s coming when we’re jamming. We like interweaving and being busy as guitar players. We might not be playin’ the most intricate stuff, but, looking back at our songs, there are only a handful of moments where either of us aren’t playing something.”
Hewson concurs. “Even from the beginning, we were able to understand what was actually going on,” he says. “Sometimes, when you’re trying to work out a song, you have this blurry vision of it. When Josh gets his hands on it, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what it would sound like if someone who is really good would do it [Josh shakes his head as he draws out a ‘Nawwwww’]. I’m not trying to be cute, but genuinely, he’s got a great sense of clarity, so that really helps my unclearness.”
Shows at NYC’s Pier 17 this past October and the Brooklyn Paramount earlier this year both succinctly exhibited Hewson and Jenkinson in their performative roles. While Jenkinson acts as the quiet killer, Hewson, both in his vocal technique and natural charisma as a modern-day heartthrob, embodies the unrequited rock star energy he was destined to possess. Despite his druthers, having written rangy, burdensome tunes like When It Breaks and It Won’t Always Be Like This in his late teens, and a prolonged smoking habit he vows to kick, he is far less animalistic, though significantly more long-term focused, than his father, the lead singer of another Irish band – U2 – was at his age.
“We both have the same lung capacity,” he says. “If the average person’s lung capacity is 100 per cent, we have 110 per cent. I’m really lucky that I got that off him, but that also means a lot more can go wrong, cause, sometimes, you’re on the edge of a fuckin’ tightrope. After the first three songs of the gig, I feel like I’m going to pass out or vomit.”
Image: Press
Hewson’s vocal tone, while cleaner than his father or Chino Moreno of Deftones, does not restrict the limits the rest of the band may reach for. “When we play live, all of us like dirtying the fuck out of our sounds,” Jenkinson says. “We put distortion and octave pedals on. We want to experiment with heavier tones. We started towards the end of the last album, so I’ll say we’ll continue it on.”
With the rockstar lifestyle comes invasiveness, objectification, “the noise,” as Hewson put it, and, in this case, murmurs of nepotism. These are unfounded. “Our favorite bands, like The Stone Roses or Gorillaz, aren’t considered that way,” he says. “It’s unnatural to see stuff like that about yourself online. When people see us, they have the impression of, ‘These guys look like they won the X Factor,’ which couldn’t be further from the truth. We never wanted to be seen as having had things handed to us. That was and is always a fear. That’s why we work so hard.”
The climb continues. “We’re three albums in, but because of the way the world works and how fast music and trends come along, we haven’t really had any financial freedom,” Jenkinson says. “We definitely have musical freedom… we can make whatever we want to be honest. We just still have the same drive and put the same amount of effort in as we did when we were fuckin’ driving around and playing pubs back in the day.”
Inhaler’s Open Wide is out now via Universal Music.
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