Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat

The Residents have released their new long-awaited album, Doctor Dark. Per their press release the project is described as “a modern opera sculpted from real-world horror and existential dread, a collision of heavy metal, classical orchestration, and the avant-garde abyss.” It’s also stated this is their most ambitious work that delves into grotesque places in the human psyche. The album was conducted and orchestrated by Edwin Outwater of San Francisco Conservatory of Music. 

Doctor Dark’s inspiration comes from a real legal case, when in the late 1980s, two teenagers living in Nevada ended up going through with a suicide pact after drinking, taking drugs, and drowning themselves in heavy metals. However, only one of them was successful with the suicide. The parents of the departed teen blamed the act on subliminal messages in music. The trial that came from this became a spectacle that inspired the documentary made by David Van Taylor, Dream Deceivers. 

The Doctor Dark album explores themes such as suicide, suffering, responsibility, and meaning in tragedy through it’s sound scape that explodes with it’s violent sound, metal power, industrial influence, and distorted instrumentals through the first act. Then, in the second act, the sound embraces classical arrangements and orchestral movements. With the final act, the album embraces The Residents’ experimental style by mixing beautiful melodies with chaotic madness. 

Doctor Dark Tracklist:

1. Prelude / Metal Madness
2. White Guys With Guns
3. Maggot Remembers
4. Tension
5. She Was Never Lovelier
6. The Gift
7. Remembering Mother
8. Contemplation
9. Survived
10. Calm Before
11. Circle Of Horns
12. Unchanged
13. The Gift Keeps Giving
14. A Choice?
15. Ol’ Man River
16. Take Me To The River