Inhaler are stepping into 2025 a new band. Their third album, 'Open Wide', is as expansive as its title suggests, capturing the boys at a moment when it feels like the world is properly their oyster.

When Dork meets the band, it's a horribly foggy December day in King's Cross. We're marched through the white wall maze of their label offices and into a cosy faux studio set up with opposing sofas and dim lighting. It's annoyingly comparable to how it feels to hit play on the new album.

Released in early February, 'Open Wide' is the perfect tonic for washing away any late winter woes, a gorgeous slice of seventies summer action made by Inhaler at their best. It's the freshest they've felt, looked and sounded in a long time, thanks to actually having a year off globetrotting and overhauling their creative process.

"I just got my Spotify wrapped, and I got 3000 minutes," says Rob Keating, the bassist, whose recent experiments with peroxide have left him with a very New Romantics crop (the internet mourns the mullet), and while they're not quite at Fontaines D.C. level of image renovation, guitarist Josh Jenkinson and drummer Ryan McMahon are significantly beardier – we're assured that this was not an intentional collective choice, but we know this because frontman Elijah Hewson looks exactly the same. Anyway. "I think it was a lot of writing, and a lot of us kind of being in our own space and enjoying that and having a break from the chaos of touring," Rob says.

"The thing I realised recently is, we make music, it's not just our job, that's what we actually like doing," says Josh. "If you take a year off and don't make music, then suddenly you're not doing anything."

"We didn't really stop working," adds Rob, "because it was just going from doing gigs to writing, but it doesn't feel like work. We were home, and we were in one space for more than, like, a week. That does wonders to your brain, resetting and grounding yourself."

"We've had a lot more stability this year than we have in the last five or something," says Ryan.

It's not hard to believe. Inhaler are a band who, since topping Ones To Watch lists in 2019, have appeared to get itchy feet the minute they touch down in a new city, so the bar for stability is pretty low. And while their 2020 was practically wiped out for obvious reasons, they hit the ground running with the 2021 release of their debut album 'It Won't Always Be Like This', a record that hoovered up the best of their singles at that point and painted a portrait of a band who might not know everything yet, but had enough giddy determination to take them to the top, and a clear knack for penning indie pop bangers that'd make that journey a lot easier.

It did its job. It took them around the world and back again, with stops off at every festival going (including the big 'uns like Reading & Leeds and Glastonbury), but why leave it at that? In amongst the relentlessness of their 2022 touring schedule, they found time to write a follow-up record, 'Cuts & Bruises', which doubled down on their ability to craft instant festival classics and planted the seed for further experimentation.

'Cuts & Bruises' sent Inhaler even higher; the supporting gigs became bucket list checks – opening up for heroes like Arctic Monkeys, Kings Of Leon and Pearl Jam, and stadium soloists Harry Styles and Sam Fender – while their own headline shows tripled in capacity, ending with a bang in November 2023 as they played Dublin's 3 Arena. But with so much going off at once, the second album cycle left the boys a bit battered, and they knew that coming into making a third, they needed to shake it up.

"It was chaotic because that album was done over a period of time where we were either in the studio or on the road, so we never really had a second to step back and look at what we were doing," Ryan explains. "Whereas with this one, we had all of this time knowing that gigs were coming back around, but not for ages. It gave us the freedom to try things. Then we wrote, like, 30 or 40-something pieces of music."

"We've been talking a lot about the first two albums; they're for a specific mood," adds Eli. "I feel like those songs almost, for me, only work best live at our show, whereas this album feels like something that you could put on at any time. And that was important to do."

Moving into the next phase of their career meant facing some tough decisions. First up, the boys needed to break up with their long-time producer Antony Genn, a process made ever smoother by the fact that he, erm, broke up with them first.

"I had a call with him. I was gonna tell him, and he knew," Eli explains. "He was like, I think you should go to someone else."

"I think he smelled it, and he went, 'I'm gonna say it first'," adds Rob, "But that's a good thing to do because it made us know that we had his support."

A mutual decision, Genn is still part of team Inhaler, but after having been their primary producer since 2017, the cracks were beginning to show, with Ryan noting it became a bit like working with an uncle.

"The small disagreements would have to be long conversations because, you know, a small detail would spark a disagreement, and then all of a sudden, it would be other shit coming up. So, it was a beautiful thing," says Eli.

"I think we got too close," Rob jumps in.

"We kind of felt like we needed a shock in our system to work with brand new people and see what other tricks we could learn from their arsenal," Ryan says.

That shock was none other than pop production royalty Kid Harpoon, although with the credits he has – Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, Florence + the Machine, Maggie Rogers, to name merely a few – must've felt more like an 8.0 on the Richter scale earthquake than just a shock? Not the case. Any nerves subsided when the boys got on a Zoom call with him and, in Ryan's words, hit it off immediately. The focus wasn't necessarily the album they'd make, but rather just albums they liked, finding common ground.

"After the call, we were all kind of like, he could be the guy," Ryan says, "and then he did become the guy and worked his magic with his engineer, Brian."

Inhaler approached Kid Harpoon for third album duties after hearing he was a fan (the feeling was mutual; the boys covered Miley's 'Flowers', a Harpoon production, in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge last year), and after seeing he worked on Kings Of Leon's latest album 'Can We Please Have Fun?', felt confident putting 'Open Wide' in his hands.

"I think we knew we wanted to try and go with a more pop-orientated producer," says Rob. "We didn't really know what that meant, and we didn't know what we wanted from it, but we just wanted to go for something big and take a risk. I think it actually worked out perfectly because Tom, Kid Harpoon, said himself that he fell into being a pop producer. He seems like the pop guy, but when you meet him, he's not. That worked really well for us. We didn't really know if he wanted to even work with us because you're seeing him doing Harry's stuff, and it feels quite its own thing. So then when we saw he was doing Kings Of Leon as well, we kind of went, well, maybe we've got a shot."

It feels wrong to credit Inhaler's new direction entirely to Kid Harpoon, but it does sound like he chucked everything they knew about writing an album out of the window and started again. He met them exactly where they are and embraced their ambition, pushing them forward like any good producer should.

"He was like, I want to make something unusual that nobody's heard," Eli says, "and he puts the music before anything."

"He'd say, what if you have this Deftones section in this song, and then in this section it could be like, Gerry Rafferty or something," Ryan adds. "That was something that we really fed off because we love a lot of the same artists, but individually, we have our own tastes, so we really related to him on that in terms of trying not to shoehorn ourselves into trying to achieve one thing that sounds like another person. It's like, do your thing, but whatever influences come into the picture, let's explore it."

With a clear goal in mind, the boys set about leaning into their poppier references on 'Open Wide'. Encouraged by their intrigue in Kid Harpoon's work on Harry Styles' Grammy-winning LP 'Harry's House' and the way the pair created a record that was unmistakably Harry – "It's bizarre, but you can't help but feel compelled to listen to it further," says Ryan – blending massive classic choruses with left-field influences became part of their own manifesto.

From 'Harry's House' to 'Your House', when Inhaler dropped the first single from this record, they'd seen that mission through. The track manages to sound like Styles' 'Treat People With Kindness', T.Rex's 'Get It On' and Norman Greenbaum's 'Spirit In The Sky' all at once, with the flair of the latter two kicking around for the rest of the album. Reluctant at first to bring in the choir that breathes so much life into that chorus, the boys' trust in Harpoon paid off in the end.

"It was his suggestion, and we were a bit like, that sounds like what sellouts do. We're not fucking gonna get a choir," Ryan jokes. "He was like, I think it's really gonna work for the aesthetic of this thing; it's not gonna be what you think. Then, it just felt right. It made us think of like, T Rex. Compared to what the demo started out as, it injected a different flavour into it that we really liked."

Most of 'Open Wide' takes on a similar feeling. Opener 'Eddie In The Darkness' remains truest to Inhaler's rule book, but the wall of guitars that back the chorus add an enormity to it that dials the track up to eleven. Then, 'Billy (Yeah Yeah Yeah)' kicks off the seventies influences that pepper the rest of the record; Elijah nods to Josh listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin during the recording, which comes through and then some, whether it's in style, tone, or a severe preference for palm-muting that could only come from Jimmy Page.

The big sonic outlier here is the title-track, which leans more towards a 90s New Order combination of drum machines and shimmery guitars. It's a further indication of the places Inhaler could go, but – much like 'Cuts & Bruises' standout 'Dublin In Ecstasy' – was actually an older idea that'd been marinating for some time.

"'Open Wide' was a demo that started in 2021," Rob explains. "It always intrigued us, but we were never really sure what it was. We never really looked at it because we were like, we know there's something great there; we can come back around to it. And then it wasn't until we actually got into the studio in London that we all just hopped on our instruments and just jammed around it for a while and captured a live performance that made it onto the record. It felt like that was gonna be the one that tied every other song on the record together; it's the heartbeat of the record for us."

"We met Tom [Kid Harpoon] at a real interesting stage for him, as well," Josh adds, "because he's got this new modular synth setup that he's learning how to use every day. There are all these effects that we'd never even think of using. So on that song, we put the drums through this delay, and he literally was switching knobs and went, 'Lads' - we couldn't hear it at this stage because we were playing live - he's like, 'Trust me, this sounds insane'. He's been using this new synth setup all over the album, and it's new for him, so he's buzzing on it, too."

"Another thing great about working with him is the small gestures of like, we wouldn't actually be sent a song that we were working on until much later on," Rob continues. "He'd always be texting about little things to do with a song. That alone showed us that he's really passionate about working on this album; he always gave us this great sense of hope that we were gonna make something good."

Elsewhere on 'Open Wide', Inhaler get a moment to flex their peak pop songwriting muscles. 'A Question Of You', teased online and on their recent US tour, employs those peppy seventies influences and pairs them with lyrics reminiscent of Savan Kotecha's work with One Direction (no, really). Its central lyric – "I'm the answer to the question of you" – is so Top 40, it's almost emblematic of why Inhaler are the ultimate crossover band of the 2020s.

Because for every decade since the 60s – when both the boyband and the teenager were invented – there have been bands young and good-looking enough to benefit from both indie acclaim and fan hysteria. So, as the 2020s see acts like Wallows, Wunderhorse, and Inhaler step up to be those bands for this era, they occupy a crucial space in the alternative scene.

"We just appreciate the amount of effort people put in to come see us," says Josh. "Even when people line up for hours in the middle of the night and shit like that, we're like, wow, because we can't think of bands we'd do that for, you know what I mean? It's a really nice feeling for us, knowing that people care about us that much."

"I just," Eli starts, "I think we've never wanted to subscribe to that idea of like, it's uncool to be a pop group, because that's a lot of bullshit. We make music that feels joyous and that maybe is a little uncool to people, but I think there's something pretty optimistic about it."

"We just love pop music," Ryan adds. "There's no greater feeling than if you're on a night out or something, and a great, classic pop song comes on. You know, you're with people you love, you've had a few drinks or whatever. It's a great thing. We've also never been that band that's tried to do a specific thing musically. We just make the songs that we want to make, and it just happens to turn out to sound quite poppy."

"We're not edge lords," Josh concludes, "And we're not going to pretend to be. We just make what's authentic to us."

Obviously, daring to be young, hot, and successful doesn't come without someone having something to say about it. The boys have had more than their fair share of criticism, with those aforementioned traits giving internet dwellers a mainline to calling them 'industry plants', 'nepo babies' (yeah yeah, Eli's got a famous dad, we know), and other made up buzz words boring people use to cut off young artists at the ankles. It's not even something we bring up, but maybe it plays on Elijah's mind.

When the conversation turns to their incredibly supportive fanbase, he says, unprompted, "I think a lot of people can look at us and go, oh, they look like a put-together fucking major label thing, but it literally couldn't have been more natural. We all met each other as friends; we made this happen. There was nobody telling us to do it."

"We probably could have done with someone telling us to do it in a certain way," Rob adds, "but we found that out ourselves."

It feels like, despite all their achievements, Inhaler are still sort of trying to prove themselves. And who could blame them?