Elijah Hewson’s natural state of stardom is coming over him in glimmers. “Yesterday there was a kid who came up on the street and said, ‘your music helped me out of a dark place,’” says the Inhaler frontman, piling into none-less-rock’n’roll mineral waters with his bandmates in the garden of a chic King’s Cross hotel. “That’s the most rock star I’ve ever felt.”
The Dublin pop-rock band’s ascendance speaks for itself: 250 million streams; a No 1 debut album with 2021’s It Won’t Always Be Like This; its 2023 follow-up Cuts & Bruises pipped to the top spot only by Pink. Then there was the subsequent UK and Ireland tour, which culminated with a homecoming show at Dublin’s 13,000-capacity 3Arena. Hewson’s got the fanbase, the profile and the swarthy, chiselled looks, yet rock godhood is a pedestal he approaches with some caution.
In fact, he’s happiest sitting back and letting his bandmates – guitarist Josh Jenkinson, bassist Robert Keating and drummer Ryan McMahon – do the bulk of the talking. Congratulate Hewson on fronting what’s now an arena band and he’ll brush off the epithet, albeit quietly admitting: “We’re not afraid of that idea. If I can say one thing about our band, it’s that we’re not afraid to be ambitious.”
When talk turns to the band’s further foray into pop on their third album Wide Awake (“Some of our favourite albums are pop albums,” Hewson insists, “Nevermind by Nirvana is so pop”), he briefly dreams of hiding away behind half an hour of My Bloody Valentine-style feedback. “I don’t think we need to be poppy to compete, it’s just the natural thing that we fall into,” he grins, charmingly. “To be honest, I think it’d be way easier if we were a noise band. I’d rather not have to sing all the time.”
Hewson’s wariness may well be down to his it’s-complicated relationship with rock’s top table. As the 25-year-old son of Bono, he grew up in the heart of the A-list rock machine (is rock stardom what he expected? “No. It’s a different era as well. That was luxury”) but when he began making a serious go at it himself with 2017’s debut single “I Want You”, he quickly learnt that he was going to have to earn it. “If anything, it made us work harder,” Hewson says. “I feel like we’ve come out the other side of it feeling like we have our own fanbase.”
He’s previously recalled ringing home for help when an Airbnb booking fell through on tour, only to be told to sleep on a park bench instead. “A lot of people look at our band and think, ‘Oh, they were put together by Louis Walsh and then just placed on a f***ing festival or whatever, on a label,’” he says. “To be honest, it’s not the truth. We’re proud of that.” Keating, a more comfortable spokesman for the band, posits the nightmare alternative: “Say your dad was f***ing getting his hands involved… what would the music have sounded like? At such a young age, how do you even comprehend how to be yourself?”
Inhaler certainly earned their spurs on the Dublin club circuit. “We did gigs in Dublin for ages and no one knew who the f*** we were, and we were so happy about that,” says Keating. Such was the lack of reverence that Keating was thrown out of the band’s first gig for being underage at 16 and had to climb back in through a window to play. “I remember the guy who kicked you out,” Hewson laughs, “he just looks up onstage, sees you playing and I think there was a feeling of fair play, kid.”
Inhaler played shows with rising Dublin bands such as Fontaines DC and The Murder Capital, but have felt more like “observers” of the scene in recent years. “It doesn’t ever really feel like there’s a sour taste in anyone’s mouth,” he says. “Maybe that’s the way of musicians who come from Dublin and recognise the challenges that come with it. It’s not a competition.” Instead, Hewson adds, there is a “great sense of camaraderie” among them.
Rather than any insider leg-up, Inhaler insist they found management and a deal with Polydor through their friendship with fellow pop rockers Blossoms. They made their name on support slots with the likes of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Kings of Leon, Pearl Jam, and the Arctic Monkeys – tours that provided varying rock life lessons. “I learnt that not many people come to a Noel Gallagher gig at half three in the afternoon,” says Keating. “The Monkeys was the opposite of that, and I think that’s what made us warm up to the idea of playing the arena show in Dublin.”
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When their management suggested their own 3Arena show for December 2023, Inhaler were, ironically, struck breathless. “New bands being in arenas didn’t really feel feasible,” Hewson recalls. “I’m surprised that there’s so many young people our age who are now interested in hearing guitars. When we were in school it was all singer-songwriters, Ed Sheeran, [popular Irish folk rockers] The Riptide Movement, Alt-J. It’s nice to see a lot of bands being put into the mainstream again.”
It’s a new stratum that the band are still acclimatising to as they grow out of populist conformism, and become more comfortable in their own sonic skin. While still rooted in melodic rock, on Wide Awake – their first album with Harry Styles producer Kid Harpoon – they expand their remit to take in War on Drugs psych hazes, tropical grooves, cinematic alt-country and beach-ready gospel rock. “I definitely winced when I heard it first,” Hewson says of the gospel choir their producer convinced them to try out, citing T Rex as an example. He’s since come around to the idea. “It actually really complemented the songs.”
The album reflects what Hewson calls his quarter life crisis. “I’m 25 now, I’m getting old,” he says without a pinch of irony. “I’m starting to think about the good decisions I’ve made in my life, and bad ones.”
“Your House” observes the stalker-ish nature of young love, while the titular character of opening track “Eddie in the Darkness” is all about temptation. “A dirty, grimy cubicle on a night out, that’s what I think of when I think of Eddie,” Hewson explains of the fictional character. “The one who eggs you on to have that extra drink, stay that extra hour.”
Canyon rocker “Again” delves into Hewson’s own concerns about settling down. “I was thinking a lot about being a parent,” he says. “I’m not on the way, but I struggle to see how I’m going to be able to engage with that… I still feel so immature in many ways. Being in a band is something where you don’t want to grow up; you get into one so you can escape real life and reality. I just hope that one day I can become a real human again.”
On the flip-side, “Concrete” looks forward to a more rigid life structure. “When you’re young everything feels mouldable,” Hewson says. “Your life feels endless, possibilities are endless. And as you reach older age you become more cemented in your ways.” It’s not as bad as it sounds, he suggests. “Maybe it’s nice to have something concrete. I don’t want to be mouldable.”
The album is notably short on grand political proclamations. Given Hewson’s background, Inhaler could be forgiven for being wary of statement rock. In person, though, they have their own modern-day issues at heart. “I hear a lot from our parents’ generation, people thinking that human consciousness was going to this place of togetherness, and it just feels like that’s all been thrown out the window,” says Hewson. “It’s actually getting colder and more distant.” McMahon considers 2025 the most dystopian era of his lifetime. “Nothing has ever felt more disjointed than it is right now.”
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Trump is unilaterally declared a “nasty guy” by the band. “The truth is always complicated, and I think that people will always lean towards a simple lie,” Hewson theorises. And they’re no bigger fans of the Muskoverse. “The algorithm, they talk about it being this kind of god or something, [but] it doesn’t just tell you what you like, it engages you by what you hate, and can spur that on more,” Hewson says. “That feels really dangerous.” As talk turns to possible TikTok bans, Keating says he would go further. “I wish all social media was banned. It feels like the more information that there is, the more people are getting isolated.”
They point to the “passive and neutral” muzak of Dublin Airport as a sample of the bland, AI-composed sound of the future. “Imagine in 10 years or something, to make music you input a mood into a machine and that’s what you get back,” says Hewson. “AI threatens our creativity as people.”
It’s heartening to hear Inhaler coming into their own – musically and personally – as they become one of a handful of acts to escape the shadow of a major rock ’n’ roll background and find arena-level success on their own terms: it’s basically Miley Cyrus, Enrique Iglesias and these guys. You don’t get to headline the 3Arena for being the son of a rock star, I point out – just ask James McCartney. “People might have come to the shows in the first place just to check it out but, thank God, people are still coming back,” a vindicated Hewson smiles broadly. “Although,” Keating is quick to point out, “James McCartney should be playing arenas…”
‘Wide Awake’ is out on 7 February via Polydor Records
