Consumer Guide Album

Tyler Childers: Snipe Hunter [Hickman Holler/RCA, 2025]
"For the birds," this young Kentuckian "worked with words," and that was just the beginning, so that circa 2017 he found himself "road-doggin' in a stripped-out van" with a lot more to come—seven albums in, he finds himself getting to the bottom of an "angst hard-fought to learn" in such locales as first Australia and then India as he essays the first country album ever to enlist the words "pheromone" or, uh-oh, "chlamydia." "Keep your nose on the grindstone and out of the pills," he's warned by his coalminer dad, who you get the feeling had more luck with the grindstone than the pills himself. When Childers emerged from nowhere circa 2017 he had the lineaments of a regional phenom—in one of my favorite strokes, he courted a Catholic girl. Wowing the other side of the world as he ponders the Bhagavad Gita, however, he clearly intends to wow you too. A