Inhaler are stepping into 2025 a new band. Their third album, ‘Open Wide’, is as expansive as its title suggests, capturing the boys at a moment when it feels like the world is properly their oyster.
When Dork meets the band, it’s a horribly foggy December day in King’s Cross. We’re marched through the white wall maze of their label offices and into a cosy faux studio set up with opposing sofas and dim lighting. It’s annoyingly comparable to how it feels to hit play on the new album.
Released in early February, ‘Open Wide’ is the perfect tonic for washing away any late winter woes, a gorgeous slice of seventies summer action made by Inhaler at their best. It’s the freshest they’ve felt, looked and sounded in a long time, thanks to actually having a year off globetrotting and overhauling their creative process.
“I just got my Spotify wrapped, and I got 3000 minutes,” says Rob Keating, the bassist, whose recent experiments with peroxide have left him with a very New Romantics crop (the internet mourns the mullet), and while they’re not quite at Fontaines D.C. level of image renovation, guitarist Josh Jenkinson and drummer Ryan McMahon are significantly beardier – we’re assured that this was not an intentional collective choice, but we know this because frontman Elijah Hewson looks exactly the same. Anyway. “I think it was a lot of writing, and a lot of us kind of being in our own space and enjoying that and having a break from the chaos of touring,” Rob says.
“The thing I realised recently is, we make music, it’s not just our job, that’s what we actually like doing,” says Josh. “If you take a year off and don’t make music, then suddenly you’re not doing anything.”
“We didn’t really stop working,” adds Rob, “because it was just going from doing gigs to writing, but it doesn’t feel like work. We were home, and we were in one space for more than, like, a week. That does wonders to your brain, resetting and grounding yourself.”
“We’ve had a lot more stability this year than we have in the last five or something,” says Ryan.
It’s not hard to believe. Inhaler are a band who, since topping Ones To Watch lists in 2019, have appeared to get itchy feet the minute they touch down in a new city, so the bar for stability is pretty low. And while their 2020 was practically wiped out for obvious reasons, they hit the ground running with the 2021 release of their debut album ‘It Won’t Always Be Like This’, a record that hoovered up the best of their singles at that point and painted a portrait of a band who might not know everything yet, but had enough giddy determination to take them to the top, and a clear knack for penning indie pop bangers that’d make that journey a lot easier.
It did its job. It took them around the world and back again, with stops off at every festival going (including the big ‘uns like Reading & Leeds and Glastonbury), but why leave it at that? In amongst the relentlessness of their 2022 touring schedule, they found time to write a follow-up record, ‘Cuts & Bruises’, which doubled down on their ability to craft instant festival classics and planted the seed for further experimentation.
‘Cuts & Bruises’ sent Inhaler even higher; the supporting gigs became bucket list checks – opening up for heroes like Arctic Monkeys, Kings Of Leon and Pearl Jam, and stadium soloists Harry Styles and Sam Fender – while their own headline shows tripled in capacity, ending with a bang in November 2023 as they played Dublin’s 3 Arena. But with so much going off at once, the second album cycle left the boys a bit battered, and they knew that coming into making a third, they needed to shake it up.
“It was chaotic because that album was done over a period of time where we were either in the studio or on the road, so we never really had a second to step back and look at what we were doing,” Ryan explains. “Whereas with this one, we had all of this time knowing that gigs were coming back around, but not for ages. It gave us the freedom to try things. Then we wrote, like, 30 or 40-something pieces of music.”
“We’ve been talking a lot about the first two albums; they’re for a specific mood,” adds Eli. “I feel like those songs almost, for me, only work best live at our show, whereas this album feels like something that you could put on at any time. And that was important to do.”
Moving into the next phase of their career meant facing some tough decisions. First up, the boys needed to break up with their long-time producer Antony Genn, a process made ever smoother by the fact that he, erm, broke up with them first.
“I had a call with him. I was gonna tell him, and he knew,” Eli explains. “He was like, I think you should go to someone else.”
“I think he smelled it, and he went, ‘I’m gonna say it first’,” adds Rob, “But that’s a good thing to do because it made us know that we had his support.”
A mutual decision, Genn is still part of team Inhaler, but after having been their primary producer since 2017, the cracks were beginning to show, with Ryan noting it became a bit like working with an uncle.
“The small disagreements would have to be long conversations because, you know, a small detail would spark a disagreement, and then all of a sudden, it would be other shit coming up. So, it was a beautiful thing,” says Eli.
“I think we got too close,” Rob jumps in.
“We kind of felt like we needed a shock in our system to work with brand new people and see what other tricks we could learn from their arsenal,” Ryan says.
That shock was none other than pop production royalty Kid Harpoon, although with the credits he has – Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, Florence + the Machine, Maggie Rogers, to name merely a few – must’ve felt more like an 8.0 on the Richter scale earthquake than just a shock? Not the case. Any nerves subsided when the boys got on a Zoom call with him and, in Ryan’s words, hit it off immediately. The focus wasn’t necessarily the album they’d make, but rather just albums they liked, finding common ground.
“After the call, we were all kind of like, he could be the guy,” Ryan says, “and then he did become the guy and worked his magic with his engineer, Brian.”
Inhaler approached Kid Harpoon for third album duties after hearing he was a fan (the feeling was mutual; the boys covered Miley’s ‘Flowers’, a Harpoon production, in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge last year), and after seeing he worked on Kings Of Leon’s latest album ‘Can We Please Have Fun?’, felt confident putting ‘Open Wide’ in his hands.
“I think we knew we wanted to try and go with a more pop-orientated producer,” says Rob. “We didn’t really know what that meant, and we didn’t know what we wanted from it, but we just wanted to go for something big and take a risk. I think it actually worked out perfectly because Tom, Kid Harpoon, said himself that he fell into being a pop producer. He seems like the pop guy, but when you meet him, he’s not. That worked really well for us. We didn’t really know if he wanted to even work with us because you’re seeing him doing Harry’s stuff, and it feels quite its own thing. So then when we saw he was doing Kings Of Leon as well, we kind of went, well, maybe we’ve got a shot.”
It feels wrong to credit Inhaler’s new direction entirely to Kid Harpoon, but it does sound like he chucked everything they knew about writing an album out of the window and started again. He met them exactly where they are and embraced their ambition, pushing them forward like any good producer should.
“He was like, I want to make something unusual that nobody’s heard,” Eli says, “and he puts the music before anything.”
“He’d say, what if you have this Deftones section in this song, and then in this section it could be like, Gerry Rafferty or something,” Ryan adds. “That was something that we really fed off because we love a lot of the same artists, but individually, we have our own tastes, so we really related to him on that in terms of trying not to shoehorn ourselves into trying to achieve one thing that sounds like another person. It’s like, do your thing, but whatever influences come into the picture, let’s explore it.”
With a clear goal in mind, the boys set about leaning into their poppier references on ‘Open Wide’. Encouraged by their intrigue in Kid Harpoon’s work on Harry Styles’ Grammy-winning LP ‘Harry’s House’ and the way the pair created a record that was unmistakably Harry – “It’s bizarre, but you can’t help but feel compelled to listen to it further,” says Ryan – blending massive classic choruses with left-field influences became part of their own manifesto.
‘Open Wide’ reads not as a neatly packaged blueprint, but as a spirited journey of trial, risk, and unabashed reinvention. The album emerges as a love letter to experimentation — a record that dares to blend the familiar with the unexpected, the live and the meticulously crafted. In every heartfelt admission, Inhaler have captured a moment of creative clarity that feels both timeless and refreshingly new. There’s an ambition to ‘Open Wide’ we haven’t seen from them before. It feels like the part where it starts getting really good, and there’s no doubt Inhaler know that, too.
This is an excerpt from Inhaler’s February 2025 Dork cover feature. Read the full interview in the new issue, out now.
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