Inhaler Take a New Direction With Open Wide
Irish band, Inhaler, have released their third studio album Open Wide and while anticipation had been building in the lead up, the music didn’t back it up. The months of promo and teasers of the album generated quite the buzz within the fandom, so when I woke up to the release on February 7th, I couldn’t wait to hear the tunes for the first time, but I was shocked at how far off the mark the foursome were with this one.
Before we dive into the album and analyse its shortcomings let’s look at how this album and its sound and was so different to their previous work.
Inhaler took an alternative production route and recruited the well-known Kid Harpoon, who has previously worked with Harry Styles, to produce the album. Off the bat, this showed fans that the album was going to take a new direction from their previous records, It Won’t Always Be Like This and Cuts & Bruises. Harpoon is known for a pop/synth sound and his music, thus far, doesn’t include many heavy guitars like a lot of Inhaler’s previous work.
The downfalls of the album aren’t because of this move into a more pop sound, but the production and mixing of the record lacks quality with some tracks sounding almost unfinished. The audio mixing of Elijah Hewson’s vocals seem to have been lost in translation as his voice is difficult to spot in the mirage of sound. It is difficult to discern his voice at instances and it’s hard to know what is being sung.
In terms of the songs themselves, the lyrics are surface level and frankly- boring. Inhaler is often compared to bands like Fontaines D.C., Blossoms, Wunderhorse, but this release doesn’t even come close to the calibre of Romance or Midas.
In A Question of You Eli sings, ‘Can’t believe that we got left where we’re left / Can’t be old if we don’t wanna be grown / Sing me a love song, I know the words, yeah / Tell me a story, but I already heard.” While the song has a catchy beat, the lyrics feel juvenile, what story are they trying to convey? How as an audience should we feel this speaks to us?
While most of the album follows the suit of A Question of You with the underdeveloped lyrics, songs such as X-Ray and Billy (Yeah Yeah Yeah) are two of the album’s redemptions. X-Ray opens with a sickening guitar lick and Elijah sings ‘My time just slips away / It’s your smile that’s all forever / Gravity, oh, hold me down / Unwillingly against / Like a satellite around your head / Feels like heaven’. The guitar in this song is stellar, and it sounds more raw and real, differing from the underlying electronic sound most of the album has. This song feels reminiscent of their debut sound echoing similarities to In My Sleep or My Honest Face.
In Billy (Yeah Yeah Yeah) the song opens with an eclectic drum sound and continues into an upbeat pop-rock tune. There aren’t many technicalities to the song, it is simply a great tune. The beat is great, it feels impossible to listen and not bop your head and tap your foot along to it. The production on this one is also skies above the rest- the muffled vocals and gospel sounding backing vocals are gone and it’s just pure Inhaler doing what they do best.
Overall, Open Wide was somewhat underwhelming. After close to a decade of being a band and now nearing their late 20s, I was hoping to see a bigger jump in the band’s maturity: more meaningful lyricism, better production and an overall a stronger album, but it was not quite up to par with the standards the band has previously set for their music.
