Almost 2 years after releasing their debut album It Won’t Always Be Like This, Inhaler are back with their second studio album Cuts & Bruises. The four-piece band from Dublin saw mass success after the release of their debut, topping multiple album charts and leading them onto some main spots at pretty big festivals like Glastonbury and Lollapalooza. As an album, Cuts & Bruises is unimpressive and leaves plenty to be desired from a band that showed so much promise after their first album, it feels like the famous ‘sophomore slump’ has hit Inhaler harder than most. That being said, it is still a half-decent album when you ignore how much better it could’ve been
The album begins with the track ‘Just To Keep You Satisfied’, a bland track that feels like Elijah Hewson (the band’s singer) got bored mid-recording and decided to use that take instead of going again. The rhythm guitar, drums, and bass are all fairly simple, a theme which runs throughout the album, and the guitar solo felt like it was borrowed from a different genre, making it feel odd and out of place.
Second up was the second single released, the upbeat ‘Love Will Get You There’, slamming straight into an upbeat and energetic verse the song then builds nicely into the chorus with extra guitar lines and backing vocals. It’s a good song overall, and is by far one of the best on an album of half-baked songs.
The next two songs, ‘So Far So Good’, and ‘These Are The Days’, both exemplify my main problem with the album: it’s so much less than what Inhaler were expected to be. Both songs come together instrumentally in the stereotypical format for the genre, and Hewson’s voice fronts them well but that’s all that can be said. ‘So Far So Good’ in particular sounds like a tribute act for The Academic, and ‘These Are The Days’ sound like a reject off of the band’s debut album. However the most formulaic of all the songs on the album has to be ‘When I Have Her On My Mind’, the 8th track on the record. It has nothing that sets it apart from any album filler that you might hear from any mid-level band; even the one aspect that is usually always safe to set Inhaler apart from other bands, Hewson’s voice, is unimpressive on this track.
A bright spot on the album comes as the third single ‘If You’re Gonna Break My Heart’. A rock ballad that would feel at home in an American stadium, the kind of scene where everyone’s waving the torches on their phones in sync. The following track, ‘Perfect Storm’ is almost as good with its solid build up of atmosphere as the song goes on but it falls short when the build up comes and instead of an energetic release it feels as though it just plateaus, leaving the song feeling half-finished.
‘Dublin In Ecstasy’ is probably the only track on the album where the instrumentation stands out over the vocals, mainly due to the guitar. With multiple lead riffs, each with separate effects like delay, chorus, and overdrive, it gives the track almost a psychedelic feel, culminating in an overdriven guitar solo after a short build up. The opposite can be said about the instrumentation, especially the intro, to ‘Valentine’. It feels like a poor attempt at copying one of the more relaxed songs off a discography from The Murder Capital or Fontaines D.C. The song itself is a tiresome love song that feels as if it was written without any real inspiration and rather just to stick another love song onto the record.
The final two songs on the record fall somewhere in the middle of the rankings; on ‘The Things I Do’, the group push out of their comfort zone ever so slightly by using a marginally different drum beat to the other songs on the record but other than that the song has no merits. ‘Now You Get Me’ has a great rhythm guitar tone in the intro that sticks out like a sore thumb in the context of the album but this tone doesn’t come back till the chorus where it is pushed to the back of the mix and left to be unremarkable.
Cuts & Bruises is a disappointing second album from a band that showed a lot of promise with their debut. Inhalers sound hasn’t matured much and the instrumentation remains simple throughout almost the whole record, leading to an overreliance on Hewson’s voice; admittedly, his voice is very good (perhaps genetics on his fathers side or the expensive, private singing lessons he’s had since he was a child) but it’s the one trick the band has and, at a certain point, doing the same trick on repeat gets boring.
Rating: 5/10
