Charm School is the latest project from Louisville, KY born and LA-based multi-hyphenate artist Andrew Sellers and his longtime collaborators Matt Filip, Drew English & Brian Vega. Today, the band announces a new 4-song EP, Skadenfreude Ploy out Feb. 20, and shares the title track. You can also pre-order the EP on cassette right HERE.
Friend of the band and noted Louisville resident Will Oldham had this to say about the band's new EP:
"The sounds on Skadenfreude Ploy remind me of music I first heard many years ago, in the 1980s. Powerful, clean and new; modern, industrial, rageful. The Ramones, by then, were something of a nostalgia act. The music industry had swallowed them whole, so that all of their messaging came filtered through the fleshy walls of demented Leviathan. The real music was happening again, after the furious waves of punk and new wave became pap fodder.
In Louisville, KY we heard things coming from the north and west of us, Chicago and Minneapolis. Artists reclaiming the territory defined, we felt, by the most visionary of musicians such as the Germs, Gang of Four, the Fall, the Misfits and the Meatmen. It all felt real enough to base one’s aesthetic values around…
There is room for hope and joy, and there are people hard at work shoring up those levies. This is not Charm School’s job. Charm School’s job is to infiltrate, radiate, negate and fascinate. To wield a real-flame torch among the droves of the lost who don’t even know they are lost. A soundtrack to the true full-live-birthing of our status as second-world juggernauts. This is what we rock to in Our Own Private Albania, as our elders and leaders prove decisively that they learned nothing but nothing in their times on our planet."
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Sellers grew up immersed in Louisville’s underground music scene, soaking up local legends like Slint, Crain, & Rodan, as well as the catalogs of Chicago’s famed indie labels Touch & Go and Drag City. Connecting the dots led to many an influential record plus a myriad of larger than life characters like Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac), Will Oldham (Palace Brothers/Bonnie “Prince” Billy, etc.), David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol), John McEntire (Tortoise, The For Carnation etc.) & a host of other idiosyncratic iconoclasts, all of whom left their particular aesthetic mark on Sellers’ then 20-something mind. Add in a little Post-Punk pepper from PiL, Swell Maps & The Fall, a dash of Post-Hardcore salt from Fugazi & Nation of Ulysses, and Charm School’s influence recipe is fairly complete.
Their first EP Finite Jest, released in July of 2023, introduced listeners to a philosophically minded, crushingly loud critique of modern life’s increasingly maddening realities. Their debut LP Debt Forever, released in January of 2025, introduced a broader range of stylistic influences and an even more acerbic viewpoint, its lyrics drenched in addictively salty, satirical humor.
Skadenfreude Ploy (yes, spelled that way), out February 20th, picks up where Debt Forever left off — with further musings on humanity’s collective tortured psyche and the many confounding implications of living in today’s technocratic hellscape. The concept of AI looms large, as well as modern life’s various manipulation traps which seem to be more and more ubiquitous and less and less escapable.
TOUR DATES:
2/22 LA - The Offbeat w/ The Hazards & Noir Dalis
2/28 LA - The Monty Bar w/ Duderella & Spooky Marvin
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