Listen to Carter Glascock’s The Crystal Pistol

When your last name has “cock” in it, your only choice is to lean into it. At least that’s how Carter Glascock explains it on his debut comedy album, The Crystal Pistol. (See what he did there?) Glascock grew up in Birmingham, Ala., but put in his 10,000 hours in Nashville, and before leaving for L.A. in 2019, he recorded Crystal Pistol live to a packed East Room crowd as a parting gift. To issue a full-length album of stand-up in the social media age is the kind of old-school move I can get behind, and Pistol hits the mark with its relatable riffs on the indignities of starving-artist life (standing at the Coinstar machine, feeling judged) and meeting your heroes and blowing it (punk icon Bob Mould, in Glascock’s case), plus a childhood tale so mortifying that if it happened to you, you’d want to move to a different state. But impressions may be the 33-year-old comic’s calling card. A few weeks ago, an off-the-cuff Ray Liotta-in-Goodfellas voiceover set to a montage of tantrum-throwing Capitol insurrectionists scored him nearly 20,000 retweets and 2.1 million views. (Excerpt: “When they detained Colby in the terminal, he had two duffel bags full of Nancy Pelosi’s vacation Polaroids before they sent him to federal prison.”) Visit Carter Glascock’s site at carterglascock.com, follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @carter_glascock, and stream The Crystal Pistol in full on Spotify. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN