Tyler Childers - Snipe Hunter [2LP]

Tyler Childers wanders well off the beaten holler path on Snipe Hunter, a 2025 record that treats country music as a starting point rather than a rulebook.

His seventh studio album was produced by Rick Rubin, with most of it cut in Malibu and Hawaii. Rubin encouraged an unstructured, organic way of working, Nick Sanborn added extra production, and Shawn Everett handled the mix. Childers' band, the players who have backed him for years on the road, gives even the strangest moments a loose, lived-in feel.

Every song comes from Childers' own pen, and the range is striking. The record opens on "Eatin' Big Time" and roams from bootlegger fiddle tunes to something close to spiritual chanting, with "Tirtha Yatra" borrowing its name from the Sanskrit term for pilgrimage.

"Nose on the Grindstone," the lead single, keeps one boot planted in the plainspoken Kentucky storytelling that made his name, which makes the detours around it all the more thrilling. His voice remains the anchor throughout, a weathered, unhurried drawl that can make a wild left turn sound like the most natural thing in the world.

For anyone who has followed him from Purgatory onward, this is the sound of an artist with nothing left to prove and plenty left to explore.