Tyler Childers

“I sat around a lot with my dad—around hunting clubs and outside of church and barbershops—listening to fellas older than me tell tall tales and flat-out lies,” Tyler Childers told Apple Music in 2019. “I guess some of that rubbed off on me.” Such understatement is characteristic for the singer, who was born in rural Lawrence County, KY, in 1991. His songwriting captures the deceptive complexity of life in Appalachia, setting his words to an old-school mixture of ’70s honky-tonk, bluegrass, and folk music. He cut his first album, the stripped-down Bottles and Bibles, when he was just 20; the opening track’s narrator’s rapid fall from grace set a compassionate standard that blossomed on his Sturgill Simpson-produced breakthrough album, 2017’s Purgatory. His fighting spirit has always been complemented with a keen sense of righteousness, a quality made explicit on his surprise 2020 album, Long Violent History, a mostly instrumental bluegrass collection. Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? (2022) experimented with a variety of genres—including gospel and folk—and Childers crafted 2023’s Rustin’ in the Rain as a pseudo-ode to Elvis Presley. For 2025’s Snipe Hunter, the artist enlisted the help of megaproducer Rick Rubin for a celebratory, and at times eccentric, seventh studio album.