'I'm 25, I'm getting old'

Dublin chart-toppers Inhaler chat with Mark Beaumont about acclimatising to arenas, quarter-life crises, and why their singer being the son of Bono made them work harder

- Mark Beaumont

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.”