Put me on aux

Whether you’re chilling at a backyard kickback or driving with the windows down, two completely distinct sounds are currently battling for control of the aux: Morgan Wallen’s slick, mainstream anthems and Tyler Childers’ gritty, Appalachian howl. 

Country music is experiencing one of its biggest booms in decades, and it is not monolithic. It is split into two ecosystems — one built for the mainstream, one built outside of it. Neither is wrong. And the fact that they can coexist at the top of the same genre right now is one of the most interesting things happening in American music.

The easiest way to tell these two artists apart is to close your eyes and just listen. Wallen’s records feel like they were built in a lab that knew exactly what it was doing — hi-hats borrowed from hip-hop, acoustic guitars smoothed down to a clean, radio-friendly shine, vocals that sit perfectly in the pocket between country twang and pop accessibility. 

It works because it’s supposed to work. Every decision pulls the song toward a wider audience, and the result is music that feels immediately familiar no matter where you’re hearing it — the car, the bar, the gym, the pregame. It meets you wherever you are.

Childers, instead, sounds like he recorded in a place that doesn’t care whether you’ve heard of him or not. Fiddle, banjo and acoustic guitar that still has grit left on it — instruments that feel rooted somewhere specific rather than designed to travel everywhere. There’s a roughness to his records that isn’t a flaw; it’s the whole point. 

Even when he pushed into strange new territory on “Snipe Hunter” alongside Producer Rick Rubin, the album didn’t drift toward the center. It went further out — psychedelic, gospel-tinged, in ways that somehow still sounded like nobody but him. Both artists are making intentional choices about what their music sounds like and why. They just do it in completely different ways.

That difference runs all the way through how each artist thinks about releasing music. Wallen’s model is built around scale and momentum — massive tracklists that give listeners more of what they already love, keep an artist cycling through playlists for months and dominate streaming through sheer consistent presence. It’s a strategy that respects the audience’s appetite and delivers on it generously. He knows what the room wants and he fills it.

Childers takes a different approach entirely. His albums are built as deliberate front-to-back listening experiences — the kind you’re supposed to sit with, not shuffle. His debut, “Purgatory,” didn’t arrive with fanfare. It crept in quietly and then never left. It kept climbing, kept finding new listeners, kept appearing on year-end charts long after its release date had passed. That kind of longevity doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when music is made to last rather than made to trend.

Wallen writes for the room — and the room is usually enormous. His lyrics trade in the imagery that country music has always run on: whiskey, trucks, open roads, heartbreak that feels familiar the first time you hear it. There’s genuine craft in writing a song that thousands of people can sing back to you on the first listen, and Wallen has that gift in abundance. 

The hip-hop influences, the polished production, the radio-ready shine — those don’t feel like compromises. They feel like someone who grew up loving more than one kind of music and found a way to let all of it coexist. His songs don’t require context or backstory. They hand you the feeling. 

Childers writes from a much more specific place — and honestly, that’s where he gets me. His songs are rooted in the working-class realities of Appalachia, steeped in regional folklore and personal reckoning and written in the kind of language that makes you feel like you’ve been somewhere you’ve never actually been. Songs like “Feathered Indians,” “Whitehouse Road,” and “Lady May” are heart-wrenching in the quietest way. 

They don’t announce themselves. They just settle in and stay there. There’s a homeyness to his music that feels rare — like sitting around a fire with someone who’s lived something real and is finally talking about it. His words are so descriptive and so specific that they stop feeling like lyrics and start feeling like memories, even ones that don’t belong to you. 

That’s the thing about folk-rooted songwriting done right: it makes the particular feel universal without ever losing what made it particular in the first place.

For me, that’s the more powerful gift. Wallen can make a stadium feel like one room. Childers can make one room feel like the whole world. 

But here’s the thing — this isn’t a verdict. At the end of the day, both of these artists are doing exactly what country music is supposed to do: make you feel something. The choice between them really just comes down to your preference. 

If you want something polished, anthemic and built to fill the moment — put on Wallen. If you want something folky, worn-in and written like it was pulled from somewhere real — put on Childers. Poppy country or folky country. Both have a place. And if you like country, both belong on the aux.

Siobhan believes you can tell a lot about someone by who they put on first.