Snipe Hunter
Tyler Childers has never been one to play it safe, crafting traditionally informed, bluegrass-tinged country music with an expansive sense of what the genre can be. On this seventh full-length studio album from the Lawrence County, KY, native, Childers goes even bigger and bolder, recruiting superproducer and noted spiritual seeker Rick Rubin to helm a kaleidoscopic collection of wild, weird songs. *Snipe Hunter* opens with “Eatin’ Big Time,” a freewheeling rocker that takes its title from a phrase Childers and his band The Food Stamps deploy to mark milestones and celebrate successes. With a lyric as wild as his wailing vocal—there’s a verse about shooting and then skinning a man in a “motherfucking mansion”—it’s a fitting entry into this new world Childers built. “Bitin’ List” gets right to the point, opening with the line “To put it plain, I just don’t like you” while The Food Stamps sink their teeth into an old-time-adjacent arrangement. “Tirtha Yatra” pairs spiritual musings with a swinging beat, as Childers waxes poetic on the Bhagavad Gita. And longtime fan favorite “Oneida,” a staple of Childers’ live sets since 2017, gets its long-awaited studio treatment, bridging the gap between the burgeoning days of his career and this obvious high point.
On his newest album, the idiosyncratic country star doles out advice, eats what he kills, and takes a trip to India. It’s his first record with no agenda in mind.
Tyler Childers 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’s ‘Snipe Hunter’ is both an aesthetic and a thrillingly profound philosophical statement.