Charm School, the post-punk outfit led by Louisville-born, LA-based multi-hyphenate Andrew Sellers alongside longtime collaborators Matt Filip, Drew English, and Brian Vega, have shared a cover of The Damned’s classic “New Rose” as a teaser for their EP ‘Skadenfreude Ploy,’ out now. The EP was tracked and mixed by Mike Bridavsky at Russian Recording (known for work with Deerhoof and Built To Spill), with additional production and mixing by Solomon Krause-Imlach in Los Angeles, and mastered by Greg Obis at Chicago Mastering Service, co-owned by Bob Weston of Shellac.
Sellers came up in Louisville’s underground music scene, absorbing the catalogs of local legends Slint, Crain, and Rodan alongside the output of Chicago’s Touch & Go and Drag City labels. That education led him to figures like Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac), Will Oldham (Palace Brothers, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol), and John McEntire (Tortoise, The For Carnation), layered with post-punk from PiL, Swell Maps, and The Fall, and post-hardcore from Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses. The result is a sound that is distinctly his own while wearing its influences with confidence.
‘Skadenfreude Ploy’ (yes, spelled that way) picks up where their 2025 debut LP ‘Debt Forever’ left off, diving deeper into humanity’s collective tortured psyche and the confounding realities of life in a technocratic hellscape. AI looms large across the record, as do modern life’s manipulation traps, increasingly ubiquitous and increasingly inescapable. If there is a throughline, the band puts it plainly: “Reality is becoming increasingly blurred with something we don’t even have the words for yet.” Listeners drawn to sharp, satirical, crushingly loud rock with genuine philosophical weight are finding plenty to sink into here