After several years of releasing singles and EPs, FIGHTMASTER, the music project of actor and activist E.R. Fightmaster, has finally released their first full-length album, Tolerance. I got to talk to them via Zoom less than 24 hours before the album was released, and the conversation fizzed with excitement.
“I thought I was gonna feel more nervous,” they tell me when I ask how they are ahead of the album’s release. “The process has felt so long and so intense that now I’m just excited about the relief of the release. I’ve made the art, and now I want people to see the art, and I want to walk away.”
After working on the album for over a year, the thing they were most looking forward to was listening to it as “an outsider.”
“Because right now they’re just mine, they’re my babies,” they say of the songs. “Once they pass this threshold, they’re no longer my property. They become everybody else’s song, it’s everybody else’s story, and I’m just stoked.”
Tolerance first started taking shape in late 2024. During that time, Fightmaster took their time so they could craft something that felt complete to them.
“I am a writer first,” they share. “And I did make a full-length album because it feels like a continuation of one long story. It’s not random songs—the order is so specific. I really wanted to create a movie within an album. So I’m excited to have people be able to not just experience a single, but to be able to listen and watch the whole thing in their brain.”
The album’s first track, “Move Through,” is Fightmaster’s favorite. They explain they were telling a friend who is also a musician that they had “scrapped” the song during the writing process because it “felt too raw” to write. Naturally, the friend then challenged Fightmaster to write the song anyway.
Though it had been months since they started writing the song, when they returned to it, it “started to fall together in these little pieces,” they explain. “It was one of those songs where as I was writing it, it was breaking my heart.” The emotions they felt while writing the song led to it becoming the album’s first track.
“It was the first song that I wrote that I was devastated by while I was writing it.”
Even now, they cry while listening to it. “I really come to terms with something that I’ve not been able to come to terms with before,” they say about the song’s bridge, which includes the lyrics:
“Forever has a way of feeling shorter everyday. And I don’t want to waste a single minute. How many ways can we set each other free. I don’t want a life without you in it.”
To the artist, “it’s like listening to a friend understand something about themselves for the first time.”
Prior to the release of Tolerance, FIGHTMASTER released four singles. “Quicksand,” which was released before the album was announced, tells the story of a relationship on its last legs. With lyrics like “I’m just a can and string away, whisper something,” and “I’m crawling out of quicksand that you can’t see—you’re patiently waiting for another me, baby you’ll wait an eternity for maybe,” you can sense the song’s speaker is struggling with the feeling of being stuck in place.
“All or Nothing,” which was the album’s lead single, is the second track on the album, placed between “Move Through” and “Quicksand.” Those three songs in conversation with each other paint a picture of a relationship very clearly no longer working, and despite knowing this, the speaker holds onto the hope that the other person might make up their mind and decide to be all in.
“Glide,” the album’s third single, is a slippery, sexy track where Fightmaster speaks the verses in their signature low timbre. The chorus pulsates with longing. In the song, the speaker convinces the object of their desire that they “could be a special number you dial when you need destruction that you find worthwhile.”
The album’s final single, “Minotaur,” is a lushly orchestrated track driven by violin and piano. In it, the speaker compares themselves to the Greek minotaur caught in the labyrinth. “Don’t fake it, if you can see how it ends you can tell me. Stop hedging your bets, overwhelm me,” Fightmaster begs, as the music swells behind them like the water over a ship.
Other standout tracks on the album include “Press Release,” which references the end of a relationship, the title track, and the final track “Plan of Attack for Dying.”
“I’m referencing a lot of different points in my life, but the thing that makes it a story to me is that I’m writing about a lot of different points in my life at the same time,” Fightmaster says. “Over the year and a half of writing this, I went through a lot of growth in a really short period of time.”
During the time they were working on the album, Fightmaster had to undergo a “really big” surgery. “[The surgery] shifted my brain and my perspective about pain and tolerance,” they say, adding it created “a paradigm shifting relationship with gratitude.” This is incredibly clear in the last track.
“I was looking at all of these moments in my life through this lens that was much more empathetic and kind and gracious than I think I had before,” they say. “And over the course of the album, you’re hearing emotional growth.”
They say the experience forced them to be vulnerable in a way they had never been before. “Pre-surgery, I didn’t realize how much ableism I had because I thought that asking for help was something I should be ashamed of,” they say. But surgery forced them to ask for help from others, which in turn made them a lot “softer.”
“I’m not afraid that thinking about a past event is gonna send me into a depression. I’m fully like, ‘Well, I feel like I should explore this thought so that maybe these feelings don’t pop up again,’” they say.
They are proud of that growth and proud of the new album.
“I made an album that I really like to listen to,” they say. “I’m excited to have something that I’m sharing that, if I found it in the wild, I would be like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ This is something I could send to friends very proudly.”
In addition to their friends, they’ve been sharing the songs with crowds on tour supporting Lucy Dacus in the spring. When we spoke, they were in the middle of supporting Lord Huron on tour. Because “Quicksand” was a newer song people knew, they enjoyed performing it, but they admitted that their favorite song to perform live was actually “Rumble.”
“That’s a song I sing with such a shit-eating grin,” they say, the grin returning. Why? Probably because they’re playing the tambourine. “For some reason when I’m playing the tambourine, I can’t stop smiling, so a lot of the photos from the shows where I’m like just cheesing are tambourine shots.” Honestly, who doesn’t have a good time playing the tambourine?
Unfortunately, you may have to wait a while to get to see FIGHTMASTER perform. Currently, they won’t be on tour again until the fall.
But while you wait, you can—and should—listen to Tolerance.
