Massively influential avant garde icons The Residents are celebrating their 50th anniversary with a new retrospective coffee table book, A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1, which will be out via Melodic Virtue on January 7. You can preorder it in the BV shop.

There's also a Deluxe Edition of the book that's signed by The Residents and by the author, Aaron Tanner, and comes with the Duck Stab/Buster & Glen Notebook 7" x 7" book, and is limited to 500 copies.

Author Aaron Tanner was given unprecedented access to The Cryptic Corporation's Residents archive, and A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 is a fully authorized visual history with rare and unseen photos, artwork, and other ephemera across 356 pages. It also comes with a 7" single featuring unreleased track "Nobody's Nos" from the Not Available era of the band.

The book also features an introduction from Primus' Les Claypool, as well as recollections and tributes from Danny Elfman, Pee-wee Herman alter ego Paul Reubens, John Linnell (They Might Be Giants), “Weird Al” Yankovic, Andy Partridge (XTC), magician and Residents collaborator Penn Jillette, Eric Drew Feldman (Captain Beefheart's Magic Band), Paul Leary (Butthole Surfers), Aaron Freeman (Ween), James McNew (Yo La Tengo), Zach Hill (Death Grips), Eric André, David J (Bauhaus), Cedric Bixler-Zavala (The Mars Volta), Josh Freese (The Vandals), Rob Crow (Pinback), Dan Deacon, Don Preston (The Mothers of Invention), Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten), JG Thirlwell, Blaine L. Reininger (Tuxedomoon), Sam Coomes (Quasi), David Janssen and Brian Poole (Renaldo and the Loaf), and more.

"It is still astonishing to listen deeply to these records—packed with ideas and so breathtakingly original," says They Might Be Giants' John Linnell of the band's influence oh him. "Like The Beatles, they seemed to be open-eared and unschooled. You could sense their excitement at discovering everything on their own and inventing music from scratch. The Residents kicked open the doors to enchanted musical realms that bands like ours found irresistible. You can hear how much we owed to them in our early recordings."

You can preorder for A Sight for Sore Eyes, Vol. 1 in the BV shop, and check out a few pages from the book, and watch a trailer, below.