There’s no “real world”
That’s a contradiction in terms
There’s just a skadenfreude ployed Hall of mirrors
Charm School have returned with Schadenfreude Ploy, the follow-up to 2025’s Debt Forever, and if you were hoping they’d mellow out, maybe brew a cuppa herbal tea, for you have badly misjudged the situation. Andrew Sellers and his Louisville-to-LA cadre: Matt Filip, Drew English, Brian Vega – are still operating like men who found the control panel and immediately started pressing every red button.
The EP chews on humanity’s collective cracked psyche and spits out a grin full of broken enamel. AI hovers over everything like an unpaid intern with godlike powers. Manipulation traps snap shut in every direction—financial, romantic, algorithmic. Sellers’ manic delivery paces the room, waving a printout of your browsing history and laughing at the absurdity of it all.
The title track, Schadenfreude Ploy, barrels forward with a No Wave twitch, guitars scraping against each other. It skewers the myth of the “real world,” calls the whole enterprise a hall of mirrors that hands you a bill for the privilege of existence. There’s a sense that ownership itself has been outlawed—everything leased, licensed, or floating somewhere in the cloud—while corporations hover like digital landlords, extracting rent from data, memory, even your own reflection. You don’t hold anything anymore; you stream it, sync it, subscribe to it. Nobody remembers agreeing to the terms, yet the charges keep arriving, neat and automatic. The band leans into that discomfort, tightening the screws with clipped riffs and a rhythm section that feels wired and faintly volatile, like it might repossess your hard drive mid-chorus.
Scene Queen takes a more personal tactic, unloading on a social climber who treats friendship like a stock portfolio. The lyrics bite. Backstabbing, shapeshifting, Faustian bargains, influence peddling…it’s all there, delivered with the kind of relish that suggests Sellers has the receipts. The groove struts in jagged steps, part art-school brawl, part basement sermon. You can practically see the eye roll.
Disgrace revs like a motorcycle idling outside a condemned building, channeling the swagger of Suicide and the detachment of Thurston Moore. The beat churns, manic and motorik, while spoken-word passages slide across the top with a wiry tension. It feels reckless in a controlled way, the band grinning as they lean into the skid.
Then Prime Mover Unmoved pulls the curtain back and reveals the philosopher under the hood. Aristotelian references in a punk record? Sure, why not. Love becomes the engine of existence, the first cause and final effect. Sellers lists the world as he channels his best Mark E Smith: rings, rivers, frost, debt, roses, until the self dissolves into the inventory. It’s grand, a little ridiculous, and somehow sincere.
Charm School’s job is to infiltrate, radiate, negate and fascinate. With this ferocious EP they torch the place and leave the smoke alarm ringing. Hope and joy may be out there somewhere. Charm School are busy poking the bear -all the while cackling at the bear’s lawyer.
Listen to Schadenfreude Ploy below and order the single here. You can purchase the EP on cassette here.
Schadenfreude Ploy by Charm School
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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The post “It’s all a Masquerade” — Charm School Skewers Our Shared Unreality With “Schadenfreude Ploy” EP appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
