Charley Crockett’s Age of the Ram, due April 3, is the third and final album of his Sagebrush Trilogy, following Lonesome Drifter (March 2025) and the Grammy-nominated Dollar A Day (August 2025). Three albums in just over a year, all built around a fictional outlaw named Billy McLane navigating bounty hunters and a shadowy syndicate called the Santa Fe Ring. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, and the first two installments earned it.

At 20 tracks, Age of the Ram is the trilogy’s longest entry and its apparent climax, with five of those tracks designated as thematic instrumentals that give the record a cinematic frame. Recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles with his touring band The Blue Drifters and co-produced by Shooter Jennings, the record is rooted in the guitar, pedal steel, piano, and harp palette that has characterized the entire trilogy.

The two singles released ahead of the album point in different directions. “Kentucky Too Long” is the kind of road-weary country ballad that Crockett writes with the ease of someone who actually lived the life he’s describing. “Fastest Gun Alive” leans into the Western fiction more explicitly, narrative and cinematic.

Crockett occupies a particular place in contemporary country and Americana: Texas-born, deeply informed by older traditions from Western swing to tejano, working in the independent space by choice and succeeding commercially on his own terms. The Sagebrush Trilogy is the most sustained creative statement he’s made, and Age of the Ram needs to deliver on what the first two albums built.

Age of the Ram is out April 3.