Luke Bryan has spent the last few weeks telling us there are gonna be “signs”, so we’ve been watching for them. Unfortunately for him, fans might have found one before they were supposed to.

Luke Combs will feature on ‘Finders Keepers’, the opening track from Bryan's forthcoming album Signs. Fans first started speculating about this blockbuster collaboration after Combs’ name briefly appeared alongside the song on the Genius tracklist.

It quickly disappeared, soon after. Which obviously made us look harder.

Because while the Combs credit might have vanished from Genius, it certainly hasn’t vanished everywhere. Pre-order listings for Signs are still currently showing Track 1 as “Finders Keepers ft Luke Combs”, including both Snakefarm Records and Townsend Music.

Neither of the two Lukes has actually announced the collaboration yet.

And that bit matters, because Bryan appears to have had a slightly more fun plan for revealing this album, than simply posting the official tracklist and calling it a day.

On August 17th, he told fans to “keep an eye on theresgonnabesigns.com” in the run up to the Friday, September 18th album release, adding: “Let me know what y’all find.”

He’s since been using the site to reveal song-titles from the record, one by one, such as confirming ‘I Liked Loving You’ as Track 10.

So, did we just find something a little earlier than Luke intended? Or are Snakefarm, Townsend and Genius all in on this one?

We should probably be clear here. There’s nothing to suggest Genius was asked to remove the credit, and Bryan hasn’t said that the Combs feature was specifically supposed to be revealed through the site.

But when a feature appears, disappears, then continues to sit rather happily on actual album pre-order tracklists while the artist is simultaneously asking fans to hunt for clues...

Well. There are gonna be signs.

The collaboration itself marks a lovely full-circle moment.

Long before Luke Combs became, well, Luke Combs, Bryan was one of the country artists he looked up to. Combs has previously cited Bryan among his early influences, alongside the likes of Tim McGraw.

Then, in 2018, their paths properly crossed on one of country music’s biggest stages. Bryan opened the CMA Awards that year with ‘What Makes You Country’, bringing out a group of the genre’s rising names to join him, including Ashley McBryde, Jon Pardi, Cole Swindell and a then relatively new act on the scene, Luke Combs.

Later that same night, Combs won New Artist of the Year. That feels quite significant looking back now.

A year later, Combs was one of the headliners at Bryan’s own Crash My Playa in Mexico, alongside Bryan and Thomas Rhett. Then there’s perhaps our favourite connection between the pair. In 2024, Combs released ‘Little Country Boys’ on Fathers & Sons - but he didn’t write it. Luke Bryan did.

Bryan penned the song alongside Dallas Davidson and Blair Daly years earlier, and Combs had apparently been holding onto it in the back of his mind for a long time.

Combs explained that he’d heard the demo “years and years and years ago”, before he was married or had children, and made himself a promise that if he ever had sons of his own, he’d record it. Eventually, he did. By later that year, the relationship had come even further around.

When Bryan launched his TV series It’s All Country, who did he choose for Episode 1? Luke Combs.

The pair sat down to look back through Combs’ career, talked about how he’d stayed grounded through everything that had happened and even spent part of the episode throwing a football around Nissan Stadium.

Apparently, the two chart-toppers are close enough that Combs also texted Bryan at 5:50am that morning to organise a watch swap. Very normal country superstar behaviour.

So ‘Finders Keepers’ won't be two strangers meeting in a recording studio. It finally puts the two Lukes together on record, after years of Bryan appearing at different points in Combs’ story.

Which makes it slightly surprising that we haven’t had a proper Bryan and Combs vocal collaboration before this. We’re still waiting for either of them to actually tell us ‘Finders Keepers’ is it. But at this point, between the disappearing Genius credit, the album listings and Bryan literally telling us to go looking for clues, we’re feeling pretty confident about this one...

For the full tracklist to Luke Bryan's new album, Signs, see below:

1. Finders Keepers (ft. Luke Combs)

2. Country And She Knows It

3. Word on the Street

4. Signs

5. Fish Hunt Golf Drink

6. Made It A Memory

7. Woods

8. Down Goes The Whiskey

9. Crooked Rows of Corn

10. I Liked Loving You

11. Killer

12. Praying By The Rules