Inhaler Interview - Featured in Mercury Magazine

Original Graphic from Mercury Magazine Issue 002

I'm a big fan of your music and have been for years. Will this album be the climax of years of work?

Eli: Hopefully just the first climax. Like we got to see our vinyls, we got to hold them up yesterday and actually see them, and I think that was a really bizarre moment. I guess it’s like the moment where the last five or six years feels like it’s all coming together.


You’ve said before that you guys used lockdown as an opportunity to rethink your debut album. How has your vision of the album changed over the past year?

Ryan: We had been touring extensively for months and months, and the idea was for us to come off of tour and have a week off and then go straight to the studio and just start immediately recording the album in March of 2020. But then lockdown happened, and the pandemic started getting bigger and bigger, and we ended up having about three or four months off, when it was originally only supposed to be a week. In that time, half of the album got written. So, it completely changed the entire outcome of the album because we were able to focus on new songs that were just straight up better than what we were originally going to record. In that aspect, for us selfishly, lockdown really benefited our music. It was weird not being able to play together or hang out together, but at the end of the day, we came out with a much better record than we originally made.


Were you guys working together in person during this time?

Eli: Yeah, there was a bit of video calling going on. We just had to find ways to do it because we knew we had to record the album and the odds really weren’t in our favor. It was one of those things where we had to make it work. We did some writing sessions, which was as awkward as it sounds but it worked, and then when we finally got together after lockdown and got to play the songs together like we were meant to, it really took the right form.


Once the album drops, what's the plan? Huge party or taking it easy?

Ryan: [laughs] Hopefully a bit of both!

Eli: Whatever is legal! [laughs] Honestly, the album is probably gonna come out and then we’re probably gonna go back over there, sit at the desk, and continue writing the second album. Nowhere is open for us right now, so you know what? We’ll have a party of our own.


You’ve said that ‘Cheer Up Baby’ is a love letter to your fans and a message of solidarity for those who have experienced mental health issues that have worsened during the pandemic. Was that song also cathartic for you? Did it serve as a message of solidarity for yourselves during the times that you were feeling isolated?

Robert: I think so. We worked on that song during the pandemic, so yeah, I guess it did.

Ryan: It was one of the first songs that we wrote together as a band and made us fall in love with being in a band, so I think, for us, you know, working on that song was kind of always a reminder as well of why we’re still doing this. The fact that it was the first song that we noticed that our fans really fell in love with, you know, it was always a really special one for us as well as them. So it was exactly that. It was a love letter to our fans that we eventually opened to the world, and we’re really happy with the response to it.

Eli: It was good to let that one go because if we had held onto it for any longer, we might’ve changed it or something.

Do you feel a specific connection to your fans and how they feel with your music and is that why you wanted to make this message?

All: Yeah.

Eli: In lockdown, we were kind of sending a message of like, “we’re still here, we’re still alive. There will be gigs soon, we just gotta hold on a little longer.” It was a big moment for us because it was the first single of the album and it kind of marked the start of the album campaign. It was a big moment.

Photo originally featured in issue 002 of Mercury Magazine

Tell us a little more about some of the songs we haven’t heard? 

Ryan: There are definitely some new surprises. We tried to push ourselves sonically and do rhythms that we haven’t dabbled in before, and really try. With “Who’s Your Money On,” we’ve got this song that’s kind of a different song entirely and other stuff like that where we just experimented and tried to get away from the single aspect of writing because that’s all we keep doing. We were going on tour, going into the studio for a couple of days, and then going back on tour, so we really got an opportunity to just like be recording artists and make a great album. I’m really excited for it, it was a lot of hard work.

Have you ventured into some new genres?

Eli: We try and use any kind of music that we like, we try and bring aspects of it into our own music. I think that genres are becoming a thing of the past very fast and people don’t really listen to one genre. They listen to the stuff on streams and you kind of just stumble upon the music and you don’t really care if it’s like hip-hop or rock or whatever, you just gotta care if it’s a good song. I think we just want to adopt that mentality in our own music and write music that feels very free and spontaneous.

You guys are touring the UK and the States in 2021 and 2022. What will the tour look like? Lots of energy or stripped back?

Robert: It’s gonna be a party. It’s gonna be a lot of energy, as long as we can have a lot of energy safely.

Eli: We’re gonna do eight hour sets [laughs]. We just can’t wait to get out and play again. We’ll do birthdays, weddings, barbecues, anything at this point.

Have you played in front of an audience at all in the past year and a half?

Ryan: No, an online audience, that’s about it. We did the James Corden show, the Late-Late Show, which was aired on TV, but that was pretty much the only kind of live audience we’ve had.

Eli: But they were empty rooms.

Ryan: Yeah, they were also empty rooms just with film crew and just like one person clapping, so that was weird.

Anywhere specific you're excited to go?

All: Everywhere!

Robert: Where don’t we want to go? There’s nowhere that we don’t want to go. We’ll play anywhere on the tour and any gig excites us and fills our hearts with joy.

Eli: Let’s see if the North Pole has anything open [laughs].

Can you tell us who will be supporting you in each continent?

Ryan: In America, we’ve got a band called Junior Mesa, who’s going to be supporting us on that tour. We have an Irish tour booked for December with this great Irish band called the Clockworks, they’re going to be supporting us there.

Eli: They’re from Galway!

Ryan: They’re from Galway, yeah! They’re a great band. Apart from that, we’re not sure if anything else is confirmed yet.

Eli: Got anyone in mind?

Ryan: Yeah, any suggestions? [laughs]

This is your debut album so what's your relationship like with everyone else in the band? I'm sure it's like a brotherhood.

Ryan: It’s good, yeah. Healthy, I guess. We can be knocking heads with each other one minute and then a minute later we’re friends.

Eli: It’s weird, I think we knock heads a lot less these days because we get to actually hang out as friends and just kind of take stuff a lot easier. And we do work really hard, but it’s not like we just go home. I think over lockdown we didn’t really get an opportunity to just hang out because it was such a stressful thing. We couldn’t go out and get a drink, and we were all kind of in the same space together 24/7, and it was weird.

Ryan: It can play with your head a little bit when you’re confined to living with a certain amount of people for a prolonged period of time when you actually can go out and do things. You know, we were living in a really restricted time of life, which is a strange thing to say a year and a half later, but we’re all in healthy mindsets at the minute, knowing that things are starting to get a little bit better. It feels like we’re coming to the end of this weird period of time, and we’re welcoming that with open arms.

Eli: Yeah, it won’t always be like this.

Ryan: Dude..

Eli: I had to get it in there! [laughs]

Ryan: You do, it’s all about self-promo.

Photo originally featured in issue 002 of Mercury Magazine

It sounds like you guys handled lockdown a lot better than most people I have spoken to.

Ryan: Oh, you don’t live with us.

Eli: We’re lucky because we’re young and we’re artists, so when lockdown happened obviously we couldn’t play gigs, but we could go back to our parent’s houses and be in the bedrooms that we grew up in and just write music and retreat into that. But, our crew on the other hand, it’s their full time jobs, you know, they haven’t worked since last March, and I can’t imagine how hard it is for them.

It’s amazing to me that you guys were able to go home, like you just said, to your childhood bedrooms, and not feel stifled, but actually feel motivated to be able to write songs because for a lot of people, that’s a very difficult thing to do, it feels like regressing almost.

Eli: It did feel a little like regressing, but we had been going back there for days off from work.

Ryan: We’d been touring nonstop, for I think like two months straight, at the start of 2020 and then we were meant to have a week off and lockdown happened, and I think in our minds we were like ‘oh great, we’ll have three weeks off now.’ And then that three weeks is now extended to a month and a half.

Eli: Then a year and a half.

Ryan: Yeah, sorry, a year and a half. Sorry, time is not a concept to me anymore. [laughs] But we were reminded everyday of how lucky we are to actually have been able to do some work in between. There’s people who haven’t worked or done anything for a year and a half, so when we remind ourselves of that, it changes our perspective.


Inhaler's debut album It Wont Always Be Like This is out 09 July.

This interview was originally published in issue 002 of Mercury Magazine. 

You can check out Mercury Magazine's website here.