Tyler Childers has always seemed comfortable in his contradictions. He’s an old-soul traditionalist whose throwback ballads regularly go TikTok viral, a recovering alcoholic who still releases some of the 21st century’s best drinking music, a stadium-sized star who hasn’t performed his most popular song in a half-decade.
For the past 10 years, Childers has been preaching his righteous Kentucky gospel (see “Long Violent History,” written in the wake of George Floyd protests). Part of that project is showing that, in contrast to how it’s typically portrayed, Childers’ home region of Appalachia is just as contradictory, complex, and full of surprises as he is. Until now, he’s anchored that message to Purgatory, his 2017 debut LP. It remains his bestselling LP and the backbone of his live show, despite him having released several terrific records (like 2022’s Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?) since.
That’s destined to change with Snipe Hunter, Childers’ career-redefining, Rick Rubin-produced new album. Over 13 tracks, Childers triples down on the trailblazing he’s already known for, singing about hunting and hindu scripture while name-checking songs by everyone from Cyndi Lauper to Stephen Foster and exploring new sonic territory (garage rock, Phil Spector pop) with his longtime bar band turned arena headliners, the Food Stamps. Childers could be taking victory laps, but Snipe Hunter is anything but: There’s the riff about koala STD’s on “Down Under”; the Hare Krishna chants that open up the Scottish folk-inspired ballad “Tom Cat and a Dandy”; the verse about lighting the “devil’s dick on fire” on “Getting to the Bottom”; the drum programming that turns “Dirty Ought Trill,” the album-closing ode to a dog-training deer hunter, into a stadium-sized sing-along. Seldom does anyone with Childers’ level of fame take this many bold leaps and wacky left turns. In a risk-averse genre like country, it’s unheard of.
Snipe Hunter, however, makes such risks feel as inevitable as they are natural. The album is a thrilling, entirely sui generis statement of purpose that simultaneously closes the loop on Childers’ past (see the update on fan favorite “Nose on the Grindstone”) while pointing toward his boundless future. In the process, it establishes him as arguably the most singular and visionary artist in country music today.
There will be much hoopla surrounding Childers’ sonic departures on this record (in addition to drum programming, there’s vocoder, mouth harp, clavinet, and modular synths played by Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn). But what Rubin seems to have drawn out of Childers, more than anything, is an entirely new level of vocal performance from the 34-year-old. Childers’ voice has never sounded like this: On Snipe Hunter, he shouts, shrieks, coos, croons, belts, and whispers from one track to the next. On “Getting to the Bottom,” he leans into vibrato, drawing practically four syllables out of the word “doused.” On “Cuttin’ Teeth,” a fictionalized tale of his own come up as a road-dogging twentysomething, Childers embraces new vocal registers, delivering the tune with an affected whisper that establishes the distance the modern-day Childers likely feels from the tale’s protagonist. Just one song prior, on “Eatin’ Big Time,” he spends much of the song outright screaming.
“Eatin’ Big Time,” the album opener, shows the Kentucky songwriter fully in command of his pen. Leave it to Childers to take one of the most tired songwriting tropes for an artist of his stature — the “it’s so hard to be famous and rich” song — and turn it into a searing meditation on class anxiety and gratitude. “Ya goddamn right I’m flexing,” Childers sings of his Weiss watch, before delivering the subsequent line with so much fury you can practically hear the vein popping in his neck. “Have you ever got to hold and blow a thousand fucking dollars?”
Indeed, Childers’ writing has never felt sharper in its strange specificity. Here he is describing alcoholism: “Do their livers scream for water?” Here he is daydreaming about bringing his band along for a holy Hindu pilgrimage: “We’d leave behind all our merch.” Here he is arguing with the “bro” bouncer in his otherwise flowery devotional “Oneida.” Here he is singing the words sworp, joist, tupperware, crocidilian, and booger. Here he is, mid-song, delivering dog-training commands: Gib laut!
Childers ties it all together in “Poachers,” an understated ballad that at first glance feels merely like yet another new song about hunting. But Childers uses his portrait of a character caught flouting poaching laws to touch on a long list of big-picture themes: the criminal justice system, small-town gossip and prejudice, the crisis of American drug addiction. By the end of the mini-masterpiece, the song’s narrator is in danger of getting into some trouble: “I’m too busy for prison,” he explains. But the narrator is proud of where he comes from, and he just might be able to find a way forward.
“I’m a miner at heart,” Childers sings with a big wink, “so I’d dig out a way.”
