Tyler Childers’ Snipe Hunter Pulls Back the Curtain On One of Country Music’s Most Fascinating Minds
The Kentucky singer-songwriter unleashes his inner oddball on his much-anticipated seventh album, talking a lot of shit, and singing about hunting, addiction, the Bhagavad Gita, and koalas with syphilis.
Tyler Childers fans can cross “Nose On the Grindstone” off the list. They’ve been clamoring for an official release of the song for years, alongside several others the redheaded Kentuckian used to play for dive-bar crowds back in the early 2010s, but have never appeared on any of his six full-length studio albums. “Jersey Giant” and “Redneck Romeo,” “Messed Up Kid” and “Her and The Banks”—indeed, Childers has a bunch of silver song-bullets in his pocket he has not yet fired.
Only he gets to decide when (or if) to fire ‘em, and he did so in June, when he released a studio version of “Nose On the Grindstone” as the first single from his highly anticipated new album Snipe Hunter. Sparsely arranged and severely intense, it’s typical of the sound that catapulted Childers from small-town hero to still-rising superstar: rough-hewn but tuneful country-folk, constructed masterfully out of acoustic guitar strings and unvarnished tales about life and love in the rolling hills and shadowy hollers of Appalachia.
That more or less describes Childers’ breakthrough album Purgatory, an instant classic produced by Sturgill Simpson and released via independent record labels in 2017, as well as its followup, 2019’s Country Squire. Together, those two releases pushed Childers to the forefront of the burgeoning Americana scene, alongside artists like Simpson, Colter Wall, Sierra Ferrell, and Jason Isbell. A rising tide lifts all boats, of course, and these days, Childers is headlining arenas and festivals.
In recent years, he has taken his newfound fame as an opportunity to challenge his growing audience. First, Childers released an album of traditional fiddle tunes and an anti-racism protest song (2020’s Long Violent History), then followed it with a collection of gospel songs played three different ways (2022’s Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven?). When it came time to promote his short and sweet 2023 album Rustin’ In The Rain, he did so with a video for the single “In Your Love” that depicted a romance between two male coal miners.
So, you can see why some longtime fans hoped “Nose On the Grindstone” signaled a return to Childers’ early days, and how their hope swelled when the second single was “Oneida,” another relatively mellow country love song he played on a radio session in 2016, but hadn’t yet released. Over on the Tyler Childers subreddit, more than one person has wondered: What if he clears the vaults, and this album is all our old faves?
It’s not. If there’s one thing we know about Childers, it’s that he will choose to zag when the world expects him to zig, and Snipe Hunter is mostly a rollicking twang-rock and roll record full of brand new tunes and hard-won wisdom, big ideas about the big ol’ world, expansive arrangements for his band the Food Stamps, and a persistent, palpable rawness courtesy of the legendary Rick Rubin, who produced the album, and Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn, whom Childers pulled in to make the songs “weirder,” Sanborn told GQ.