The Dublin chart-toppers are back with their third album, the pop-skewing ‘Wide Awake’. Ahead of its release, the band sit down with Mark Beaumont to chat about acclimatising to arenas, quarter-life crises, ‘nasty’ politicians – and why their frontman being the son of rock luminary Bono only made them work harder. 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.”.

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.”.