THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Charm School is the latest project from Andrew Sellers (fka Andrew Rinehart) and longtime collaborators Matt Filip, Drew English, Brian Vega and Jason Bemis Lawrence. The name change signals a move away from Sellers’ previous songwriting efforts (as evidenced by his recent duet with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) toward a much darker and more aggressive sound. Think ’70s post-punk and no wave mixed with ’90s post-rock and you’ll be close.
Originally from Louisville, Sellers has paid his dues in both the N.Y.C. and L.A. DIY music scenes, and his various bands have played with seminal acts like Joan of Arc, Grizzly Bear and At The Drive-In.
Discussing the single Without A Doubt, “This song is a bit of a throwback to the kind of music I was doing before Charm School started a year and a half ago. It’s by far the most pensive, melancholic song on the record, and it seems fitting that it’s coming out right now, amidst all the turbulence in the world.”

“The main theme of this new record is financial uncertainty (or just uncertainty in general), so the main thing I remember about this song is the refrain ‘Please don’t let me run out of money’ coming out randomly during practice one day. I didn’t think anything of it ’cause I was just filling space, but over time I started to realize that I really truly did have that fear, and it came from a very deep and maybe even unconscious place.
“It’s funny because I had a good job when I was writing the song, in fact it was the best and most well-paying job I’ve ever had. Of course I always knew that could change though, and it did — I got laid off a year or so ago. I definitely feel that line when I sing it now. I’m very curious to see how the next year goes in this country. I have a feeling a lot of people are gonna start waking up to how little capitalism really cares about any of us.”
Previously, the band shared the single Happiness Is A Warm Sun. While they usually work in the same lane as bands like Metz or Protomartyr, Sun finds them sounding more like Lou Reed fronting a krautrock band like Can or Faust. “This song is kind of an outlier on the record,” Sellers says. “It’s the only song that was basically improvised in the studio, and the only one where the lyrics were written sort of ‘automatically.’ They’re all ideas that have been swirling around in the collective unconscious for awhile now, pertaining to the intense state of the world: the rise of fascism, ongoing wars, financial pressure, overpopulation, media at a million miles per hour, the spectre of the algorithm, the total lack of empathy online, etc.”