Following up his acclaimed 2019 release Country Squire, Tyler Childers has released a surprise, socially conscious LP dubbed Long Violent History.

Providing context to the LP, Childers explains in an accompanying video essay that Long Violent History focuses on the ongoing cycle of racial injustice in America and our citizens’ habitual “inability to empathize with another individual’s or group’s plight.”

Childers theorizes, “What if we were to constantly open up our daily paper and see a headline like ‘East Kentucky man shot seven times on fishing trip,’ and read on to find the man was shot while fishing with his son by a game warden who saw him rummaging through his tackle box for his license and thought he was reaching for a knife? …How would we react to that? What form of upheaval would that create? …If we wouldn’t stand for it, why would we expect another group of Americans to stand for it? Why would we stand silent while it happened, or worse, get in the way of it being rectified?”

The final song of the album – title track “Long Violent History” – echoes these sentiments, with Childers singing, ““How many boys could they haul off this mountain/ Shoot full of holes cuffed and laying in the street/ ‘Till we’d come into town in a stark ravin’ anger/ Looking for answers and armed to the teeth?”

100% of the profits from Long Violent History will go toward Childers’ Hickman Holler Appalachian Relief Fund, which sponsors “philanthropic efforts in the Appalachian Region.”

Watch Childers’ video essay and listen to Long Violent History below: