Charm School – Skadenfreude Ploy
Louisville-born, LA-based artist Andrew Sellers returns with Charm School’s new four-song EP Skadenfreude Ploy, out February 20th. The title track arrives as a blistering post-punk assault that channels decades of underground DNA into something that feels both historically rooted and unnervingly current.
The new EP picks up where 2025’s Debt Forever left off, diving deeper into humanity’s collective tortured psyche and the confounding implications of living in a technocratic hellscape. AI looms large, as do modern life’s manipulation traps that feel increasingly ubiquitous and inescapable. The title track lands as a paranoid pulse of repetition and pressure—loud, caustic, and intentionally uncomfortable. It doesn’t offer escape so much as confrontation.
The lyrics paint a cynical picture of modern economic anxiety, where paying bills and saving money never adds up to actual security. Sellers dismantles the concept of a “real world” as a contradiction in terms, replacing it with a hall of mirrors built on schadenfreude—a system designed to keep you playing a rigged game. Lines like “Either make your play / Or you’ll be getting played” capture the exhausting choice between complicity and exploitation, while “No matter how much you make / No it’s never quite enough for you to make any headway” nails the treadmill feeling of contemporary life.
Will Oldham had this to say: “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.”
Working with longtime collaborators Matt Filip, Drew English, and Brian Vega, Sellers has created music that feels less like commentary and more like provocation. Following 2023’s Finite Jest and last year’s Debt Forever, Skadenfreude Ploy tightens the screws, sharpening its focus on power, control, and collective unease. Charm School will support the EP with select Los Angeles dates this February.
Tracklist:
- Skadenfreude Ploy
- Scene Queen
- Disgrace
- Prime Mover Unmoved
