Inhaler on Leaning Into Pop With Kid Harpoon-Produced Album ‘Open Wide’: ‘We’ve Never Really Felt Like an Indie Band’

variety.com:

Ellise Shafer Inhaler don’t mind if you call them a pop band. The Dublin-bred quartet — made up of singer and guitarist Eli Hewson, guitarist Josh Jenkinson, bassist Robert Keating and drummer Ryan McMahon — got their roots in the alt-rock scene, and embraced that sound with debut album “It Won’t Always Be Like This” and 2023’s “Cuts & Bruises.” But for their third full-length effort “Open Wide,” out today via Polydor Records, the band wanted to go a slightly different direction. “Just because something has guitars over it, I don’t think that excludes it from being pop,” Hewson tells Variety over Zoom, calling from Dublin alongside Keating.

Though he acknowledges “we’re not writing like, ‘Espresso’ by Sabrina Carpenter,” Hewson says “we’ve never really felt like an indie band either.” Indeed, “Open Wide” could be the band’s most widely-appealing record yet, with an array of influences on display ranging from ’70s glam-rock to early 2000s alternative and everything in between.

At the crux of the sound switch-up is Kid Harpoon (real name Tom Hull), the hitmaker behind much of Harry Styles’ discography, whose bright, glittery production style is instantly recognizable.

Inhaler, which had previously opened for Styles in Ireland, loved Harpoon’s work on “Harry’s House.” But as Keating points out, he had also worked with Kings of Leon on their ninth album “Can We Please Have Fun” — “so we knew he could probably take on a band,” the bassist says.