Open Wide
The anthemic rock of Inhaler’s first two albums, 2021 debut *It Won’t Always Be Like This* and 2023 follow-up *Cuts & Bruises*, catapulted the group into the world’s arenas and stadia, but in the whirlwind of success, they barely had time to pause for breath. It was only when starting work on what would become third album, *Open Wide*, that singer and guitarist Eli Hewson, bassist Robert Keating, guitarist Josh Jenkinson, and drummer Ryan McMahon cleared the schedules and returned to the Dublin rehearsal space they first began playing together in as teenagers, jamming ideas and writing music together with no external pressures or looming deadlines. “It was the first time we’ve been able to do that in years,” Jenkinson tells Apple Music. “As soon as the second album was finished, we were already writing music,” adds Keating. “From the earliest days, we knew that we were going to try and do something a bit different for this one.” The group took their freewheeling rehearsal space demos to Florence + the Machine/Harry Styles producer Tom Hull, aka Kid Harpoon, who helped fashion not only Inhaler’s most sonically ambitious record to date (check the title track’s spacious beatscapes or “X-Ray”’s sci-fi Western chop-ups), but one that also boasts some of the most joyously melodic songs of their career. The unashamedly pop-facing burst of “A Question of You” or “Even Though”’s Springsteenian rush display the confidence of a group who know they can now try their hand at whatever takes their fancy. “I think a lot of the confidence on this album was actually just trusting our gut,” says Hewson. “That has influenced every decision. Maybe in the past we overthought a little bit too much. On this one, it was just like, ‘Does it sound good? Do you need to overthink that lyric? Is that drum part good? Should we just leave it as it is?’” Here, Hewson and the band talk us through *Open Wide*, track by track. **“Eddie in the Darkness”** Eli Hewson: “With our last two albums we’ve opened with a big massive guitar chord or a keyboard riff, and so choosing this as the first track was flipping that on its head. Also, this was one of the first songs that we were all super excited about, so it felt really natural to open with it.” Ryan McMahon: “Someone said to us that it sounds like they’re walking in on us playing in a room together, so it felt like a nice nod to us being back playing together in a room for the first time since we were 17 with no gigs on the horizon or anything like that.” **“Billy (Yeah Yeah Yeah)”** EH: “It’s weird, we had this first-name thing on this album that kept happening on the demos. It was a complete accident. Billy, Eddie…there was one called ‘James’ that got cut. A lot of these songs are like conversations with people that you’re witnessing, which was a different approach to the lyrics than on the first two albums, which felt more personal and introspective. I guess I learned that from Bruce Springsteen, who’s a writer I really appreciate. He jokes about it, he writes all these songs about working in a steel mill but he’s never worked a day in his life!” **“Your House”** EH: “We struggled with the instrumentation on ‘Your House’ for a while but, once we got that, it all just clicked. We stripped a bunch of stuff out and put that synth in and we were like, ‘OK, this is a hit!’” RM: “We were worried that it sounded a bit too much like ELO for ages but once Tom \[Hull, producer\] got his hands on it, it just worked.” **“A Question of You”** RM: “It’s quite in-your-face pop that one, which we were a bit nervous about initially. But as time went on and we played it and we listened to it more and more, we just thought, ‘Fuck all that, it’s a good song!’ We’re not scared to have that ambition. We might have reservations here and there about certain things, but we’re not worried to use joy as a defiant thing in our music.” **“Even Though”** EH: “There’s quite a broad scope sonically and stylistically on the album. There’s a lot of different things going on, but there’s a certain sound and groove that runs through all the songs, which you can really hear on ‘Even Though.’ I’m really happy about how it all came together. This song is a little bit more personal, it was from direct experience. That was a bit of an outlier for me, lyrically.” **“Again”** EH: “I really found a new appreciation for writing lyrics on this album. On the first album, it was a bit like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got to write lyrics now…’ On the second one, I started to get more into it, and on this one, I really felt like I was at a place where I was having fun with it. That allowed me to be a bit more like, ‘Let’s write about a character, let’s set the scene…’ ‘Again’ felt like you were writing it on somebody’s shoulder, kind of peering around.” **“Open Wide”** RM: “This was a bit of a happy surprise. It was from a demo that we made in like 2021. We all really loved the sound of the demo. It kept grabbing our attention and we kept saying, ‘OK, we’ll come round to that eventually…’” EH: “It was like a house track on the demo. Who knows where it came from? I wasn’t feeling that it would go on this album because it felt so sonically different, but now it’s one of my favorite ones. I’m really proud of it.” **“All I Got Is You”** EH: “This one was the last piece of the puzzle. We wrote it just after the second album, but it was one of the last songs we recorded for this record. It’s our nod to The Smiths and that ’80s world. We don’t often get to represent that in our music, so it’s a nice thing to do. Plus, it’s really fun to play.” Robert Keating: “I remember ages ago thinking that it sounded a bit like a Harry Styles song—then we ended up working with Harry Styles’ producer on it!” **“Still Young”** Robert Keating: “‘Still Young’ feels like the dark horse on the album. Sometimes when you’re writing songs, you can overlook the simple songs. I don’t mean simple in a bad way, but like there’s no bells or whistles on it—it’s just a great song. Once we got a choir on it and did one or two things, it felt so big. It was always doing its job, so we really didn’t have to work too much on it.” **“The Charms”** RK: “There’s almost a country undertone to that song. I guess in the storytelling element to it, the chorus sounds like you can imagine a guy singing it in a bar. It’s kind of poppy, but it’s also not, if that makes sense.” **“X-Ray”** RK: “On the demo it sounded quite a lot like The Cure. We kept a lot of the stuff that we loved about the demo in. There’s a keyboard that stayed and the chorus was this really cool middle eight on the early demo. It was kind of like Frankenstein. We had to chop and stitch stuff together and see what worked. It feels quite experimental within the record. With all the recording techniques that we used for the album, this one feels more on experimental side.” **“Concrete”** EH: “It definitely goes to a darker level, ‘Concrete.’ We’ll always write love songs. I think almost every song is a love song in some kind of weird, obscure way. We were thinking about the idea of something that you walk into willingly knowing that it’s going to hurt you in the end. The idea that, if you love something, you’re putting yourself out there. You’re basically asking to be hurt. You’re opening yourself up to that danger. I think that’s a realistic picture of love. It’s not all daisies and flowery dresses.” **“Little Things”** Josh Jenkinson: “‘Little Things’ is the sort of song we would have normally opened an album with which is exactly why we put it at the end.” EH: “It’s a big strong point to leave it on. We didn’t want to wimp out at the end of the record. It was interesting to do what we would do at the beginning of our old albums at the end of this one. I love how it feels at the end. I really do.”
Inhaler continue to bend rock & roll into new shapes on their new festival-ready record, 'Open Wide' - read the NME review here
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Open Wide by Inhaler album album review by Beau Goodwin for Northern Transmissions. The Irish band's LP drops on February 7th via Universal