Barely 15 months after the release of their debut album, Inhaler are teeing up the release of their second. But the Dubliners are also taking a minute to consider how far they’ve come since It Won’t Always Be Like This, an in-at-Number One triumph on both sides of the Irish Sea, heralded the arrival of the most exciting four-piece guitar band since… well, feck knows when, right?
So, how far? Creatively: a good distance – Cuts & Bruises is the sound of a terrific young guitar band firing on all cylinders and purposefully alchemising the magical momentum of a staggering breakthrough into an 11-track belter that smartly, confidently builds on everything they’ve already achieved.
But geographically: frankly, literally, no distance at all.
“When we found out we were Number One, we were sitting right here where we are now, in McGlynn's pub,” begins frontman and guitarist Elijah Hewson, supping a pint of the black stuff in the same establishment in London’s Kings Cross one late autumn afternoon.
“On the way here, we were doing a radio interview in the back of a car,” says drummer Ryan McMahon. “The Uber driver was wondering why we got so excited in the back. We were, like, ‘oh, we just got a Number One album’, and he was like, ‘oh, cool. Didn't believe us!”
To be fair, the band couldn’t quite believe it themselves. “It's just a weird thing to digest,” admits Robert Keating, bass. “But it proved that we have a good fanbase and that we were, you know, moving in the right direction."
“And,” adds guitarist Josh Jenkinson, “it was a massive achievement for an Irish band to do that as well.”
Still, with the paint still wet on Inhaler’s remarkable, out-of-the-box success – big slots at Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, an Arctic Monkeys support, international tours galore, with landmark gigs to come with Sam Fender, Harry Styles and more Monkeys business – it all takes getting used to.
“We still have a bit of impostor syndrome about it,” admits Hewson, “because it's something that you always heard about with your favourite bands growing up. And to be in a guitar band that's gone to Number One these days seems very bizarre – and so '90s!”
Inhaler are so 2023: a bunch of lads writing their own songs, and their own script; being true to their friendship and shared future; telling a story of young love and band lore, both of which feed into the vivid songs on Cuts & Bruises. It reunites the foursome with Ant Genn, the musician-producer Zelig of Britpop and beyond – an early member of Pulp and also composer/Musical Director on Peaky Blinders. Recording again in his Narcissus Studio in northwest London in between neverending touring commitments, they were more than happy to record again with the man they laughingly refer to as their Band Dad.
“We've known him since we were 17, 18,” notes Hewson, speaking to the fact that, having been together as musicians for half their young lives, they all left school as soon as was reasonably feasible and hit the ground rocking, determined to make a go of their band. “He's like a nuclear reactor in terms of his energy and heat. He’s a bit like: ‘Come on lads! These songs aren't good enough! Let's fucking finish them!’ And we needed that. Especially if you're coming off tour, being really fucking exhausted, and you find it hard to get motivated. Ant was always there to light the fire under our arse.”
With the 2020 recording of It Won’t Always Be Like This rudely interrupted by you-know-what (and yet, brilliantly, sounding like a coherent, confident opening statement-of-intent), Inhaler were, post-pandemic, determined that its follow-up would mainline their self-generated power.
“It was totally a case of keep going, which made us get the album done quicker,” thinks Hewson. “But it was juggling: recording, writing songs, touring... It was really intense. And I think that's kind of what we wrote the songs about: exhaustion!
“The subject matters of the songs are still all about coming-of-age stuff – the standard stuff you write when you're a teenager,” continues the singer, the band’s principal lyricist. “But it also became a little bit more about being in a band. These songs are less about the world around us, and more about what's going on inside Inhaler.”
First single These Are the Days is a case in point, a glorious, euphoric, celebratory, charging indie-rock anthem. It was one of the standouts from the band’s stint in The Nunnery, a Dublin rehearsal space that, in a former life, was exactly that. The foursome bunkered in there over there last Christmas, rigorously writing, working up and rehearsing a brace of new songs.
“It was just the four of us jamming in the live room and trying to come up with ideas on the spot,” says Keating. “Playing live for a few months beforehand really helped shape what kind of direction we wanted to take it in.”
“That feeling of being in a band again, being back out on the road again, definitely shaped the lyrics for that song,” says McMahon. “So we thought it would be the perfect curtain call, nodding to where we’ve come from with it Won't Always Be Like This, and moving onto this new album."
Love Will Get You There, propelled by fat bass and sprinkled with sparking guitar lines, was another early winner.
“It's a bit upbeat,” grins Hewson with some understatement. “And at other places on the album, we do go a little bit darker a little bit slower. And in some ways, it is an album of love songs – and love is something we can't get enough off. So this song just felt right.”
Elsewhere on Cuts & Bruises, we hear the sound of a band hungry for experiences, of both the world and of musical history. Keating explains how the wistful, rootsy, honky-tonk piano-powered If You're Gonna Break my Heart took its inspiration, “When we were touring America, we were listening to all of that country music, The Band, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash. And there was something about this song that just didn't really feel like anything that we had done. The lyric in the chorus that kind of really grasped everyone: ‘If you’re gonna break my heart/smash it to pieces/because I’m not gonna need it/as much as I do right now.’ We knew this was something special, an avenue we hadn't really explored before. And the song really does tear you apart.”
As for Just to Keep You Satisfied, a synth-rock anthem with a gnarly middle-eight which opens the album and which boldly recalls The Big Music of Simple Minds and The Waterboys, Jenkinson describes it as “the first demo that set this album in motion – a mission statement.”
On the first record there was a lot of overdubbing,” says Hewson. “But overall this just felt a lot more organic. We've watched a lot of Get Back and that rubbed off on us “Get Back was a hugely important thing for us,” nods McMahon of Peter Jackson's blockbuster Beatles documentary, which dropped on Disney+ while the band were in The Nunnery. “After a time when everything was locked down, there was no touring happening, all of a sudden, we were blessed with seeing the greatest band of all time go through their own struggles and hardships, trying to write and work together.
“That was definitely something that we experienced purely through default," the drummer continues, "of not actually being able to be together. And then we watched this documentary. It just gave us that surge of inspiration that we needed going into make the difficult second album. We were like, if The Beatles struggled...!”
As Eli Hewson reflects, “there's something powerful about just a band. A lot music these days is quite cold and very overproduced. But to be reminded of the magic that comes out of four people all playing together in a room like that – that was groundbreaking for us.”
Here then, all over again, already, are Inhaler. They’ve got history and vision. They’ve got magic and momentum. They’ve got rock and roll. And they’ve got Cuts & Bruises.
