Life, Death, & Prizes

This is a genre-bending album about, well, life, death, and other prizes. Featuring futuristic sci-fi folk pop about AI and human emotions, medieval-inspired love and death ballads, glam rock stompers about planned obsolescence, and psych freak-outs. Fingerless have been building towards this release since the first single taken off this album, 2019’s ‘Tambourine Addict Who Plays the Drugs.’

Life, Death, & Prizes, Fingerless’ 4th album, is the first to be "properly" recorded in a studio with a full band. Cheeseman’s project started performing as a band (rather than a solo project) back in 2017, and this album is the result of countless jams and performances around Meanjin/Brisbane between 2017 and 2019.

When recording started, Fingerless consisted of a fresh-faced 4 piece band of friends (Marc, Warwick, Jonny, and Zara - two of which were married), and an open world full of possibilities. By the time they had finished recording the final overdubs in early 2021 only 3 members remained (Marc, Warwick, and Jonny) - divorce had shaken the band to its foundations, and of course the brave new post-2020 world was rapidly unfolding in unexpected ways, which caused many delays in finishing the album. After Zara and Jonny split up, Zara moved to Melbourne and has been heavily involved in the preparation of this album from her new home - including recording some final overdubs while she was back in Brisbane on a brief visit. Thankfully Zara and Jonny are still very close friends, and she’ll be joining the band up on stage when they head down to Melbourne for some shows in the near future.