The Residents

For most music fans, The Residents are a quartet dressed in tails, their faces masked by eyeballs. But beyond the image, the San Francisco band is one of the most original and innovative in rock history. Formed in 1966, but emerging at the height of the no-wave wave at the end of the following decade, The Residents let loose a unique style flirting with jazz, electronic music, classical and easy listening. This melting pot, which includes a satirical vision of American society and various ambitious multimedia projects, revels in hijacking all references, and is the source of some fifty iconoclastic, heterogeneous, conceptual and unbridled albums. Some of them, such as The Third Reich'N'Roll (1976), Eskimo and Commercial Album (1979), Mark of the Mole (1981), Freak Show (1990) and Gingerbread Man (1994), are already part of the heritage of avant-garde American music. In 2017, four years after Mush-Room, the band of anonymous musicians produced a new album called The Ghost of Hope.