The Residents

With a hazy history that stretches all the way back to the late '60s, The Residents spent decades establishing themselves as the ultimate individualists, developing a fiercely idiosyncratic, unconventional style that bears little relation to anything else in music. Taking a resolutely DIY attitude to composition, they created their own musical universe that owes little to the rules the rest of the world observes. Throughout their long career they maintained an air of mystery by refusing to reveal their names or faces, frequently appearing with the giant eyeball masks that became their visual signature. The members went to school together in Shreveport, Louisiana where they began engaging in musical experimentation. By the late '60s they'd relocated to San Mateo, California where those experiments intensified. In 1971 they officially became The Residents, and the following year they made the move to San Francisco, where they started their label Ralph Records. The first Ralph release was 1972's little-heard Santa Dog EP. In '74 their first LP, Meet the Residents, arrived. They spent the rest of the decade releasing a string of now-classic albums that amped up the weirdness even as the music became increasingly sophisticated. Records like Fingerprince, Not Available, Eskimo, and 1980's Commercial Album are the foundation upon with The Residents' cult-hero status is based. In the '80s they began to incorporate more electronics, and released three conceptual albums dubbed The Mole Trilogy. By the '80s, Hardy Fox, Homer Flynn, Jay Clem, and John Kennedy began to speak on behalf of the band as representatives of the umbrella organization The Cryptic Corporation, and it has long been assumed that they are or were in fact The Residents. But it was only in 2017, after Fox's departure from the fold, that he finally outed himself as a member, and no one else has ever done so, though it's been widely suggested that by the 2010s Flynn was the only remaining member of the original camp. Whatever their membership, the always-prolific Residents remained active throughout the 2010s, and in 2015 the Residents documentary Theory of Obscurity was released.