Meet the Residents is the debut studio album by the American art rock group the Residents, released on April 1, 1974, through Ralph Records. Most of the album was recorded throughout 1973 during breaks from production on Vileness Fats, the group's film project and main focus at the time. The album is said to adhere to N. Senada's "Theory of Phonetic Organization," in which music composition should be based on individual sounds rather than traditional musical notes.

Music
The music on Meet the Residents is a mixture of several Western genres, including blues, jazz, opera and classical music, performed in an amateurish manner, deliberately or otherwise. The album features much of what came to be the Residents' trademark sound for most of the 1970s, with loud horns, odd time signatures and cartoonish vocals. Fans and critics have compared the music to that of Captain Beefheart and the Mothers of Invention.

The first six tracks on the album segue into each other to form a sort of suite, starting with a skeletal cover of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots are Made for Walkin'" before transitioning into a medley of piano melodies, Dadaist lyrics and oddly-timed percussion, ending in "Smelly Tongues", one of the group's better known songs.

The rest of the album is composed of longer, more developed compositions (with the exception of the short "Skratz"). Tracks like "Rest Aria" and "Spotted Pinto Bean" are structured in a classical manner, with grand piano backdrops, horns, sound effects and operatic vocals.

Meanwhile, the second side of the album consists of more percussion-based mostly instrumental compositions, particularly the track "N-ER-GEE (Crisis Blues)", the longest track on the album, a suite which at one point notably samples and loops the Human Beinz single "Nobody but Me" (around the word "boogaloo") and builds increasingly chaotic music around it.