The Residents

Masters of mystery and spectacle, San Francisco’s The Residents have confounded and delighted audiences in equal measure for over 50 years. Appearing in public in giant eyeball masks and top hats to preserve their anonymity, they’ve secured their place as one of America’s weirdest pop-culture institutions with a sprawling oeuvre of mutated Top 40 covers, absurdist electronic experiments, DIY concept albums, and multimedia stage productions. The founding members of the group met as teenagers in the ’60s in Shreveport, LA; by the early ’70s, they had decamped to California and taken on their band name as a tribute to a rejected demo tape (addressed simply to “Residents” when it was mailed back to them). The dissonant pop parodies and primitive drum-machine jams of their early albums show the formally untrained artists bursting with subversive ideas and humor. Later, they honed eerie synthesizer textures and bizarre vocal effects to document imaginary societies and dissect America’s cultural underbelly on albums like 1981’s Mark of the Mole and 1988’s God In Three Persons. The Residents have maintained a prolific schedule of touring and recording into the 2020s, dutifully maintaining the anonymous magic of their avant-garde enterprise even after cofounder Hardy Fox publicly unmasked himself as a Resident not long before his death in 2018.