Inhaler – A Question of You Review

What goodwill can be had for Inhaler has been depleted massively by these three singles. Their pop-adjacent sound has undone the growth heard on Cuts and Bruises. A disastrous turn of events sees the Elijah Hewson-led band pair with Harry Styles producer Kid Harpoon. Never before has there been such a misalignment in production and performance, and yet it still gets the best out of A Question of You. Art in any medium of the last century, be it film, paintings or music, has questioned who we are as individuals. Who the songwriter and the band are comes through, too. These are questions of individuality, of purpose in the face of indifference. A Question of You gets nowhere close to these ruminations yet asks the question anyway, presumably to try and exorcise some lighter messages from the band’s previous releases.  

But you cannot half-arse a song of heartfelt importance. Superfluous chatter on a bed of empty, upbeat guitar work which would not feel out of place at the top of the charts. That is no compliment. Inhaler has receded from the cutting edge, dulled their knives and strapped them to the safety of a conveyor belt pop performance. They are an indifferent unit, an articulate and still bouncing band whose direction is senseless and their writing coasting on the muted riffs still present but barely standing out. It is not a question of you the band must worry about but a question of what the future holds, of what comes next for a band who were, rightly, moving on from an image they did not feel defines them. But to move from the black-and-white variants, the leather jackets and cold coolness to whatever lighter emptiness this is, is a fatal error.  

A Question of You is, at its best, trivial. Slight new wave influences on the band yank them away from the alternate rock scene and have them pitched as some response to a Matt Healy-shaped hole. Hollow emotional consistencies can be heard through A Question of You, a song which is as familiar as the stories and love songs it mocks in its second verse. Those already heard songs are free to rip into, so long as you are not making one yourself. Inhaler points and laughs at their reflection here. Very little about the band as an identifiable, unique sound can be heard on A Question of You, an error in the production department which grows from their lead single, Your House, and lacklustre title track, Open Wide.  

At least Your House had some variations, some gospel plugs and a bit of crunch in its electronic fuzz. Nothing of the sort for A Question of You, as straight-shooting and underdeveloped a song as you will hear from a band confident in their new approach of broad appeal and generalised semantics for the sake of appealing to every person possible. Gone are the fittings of Dublin and the influences of a great city, and in comes a writing style, a meritless production, where appealing to people who need to slot themselves into songs as the main character for any chance of relating to them. A heartbreaking turn in form for a band whose promising rise has, by the sounds of it, run out of juice.