A Collector's Edition of 900 copies was released in 1982 and came with silk-screened record covers and sleeves with a brown vinyl pressing of the album. The lyrics were printed on the inner sleeve and the back cover was signed in pencil by The Residents. Some of the original pressings were shipped with a folded 50cm x 70cm promotional poster for the album.

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After the New Wave music press decided that The Residents weren't any fun anymore, the band began to feel angry, confused, and frustrated. Deciding that "a disaster was in order", they set about composing an album which told the story of a culture driven from their homes by a storm and forced into a confrontation with another people. This album was the first part of a planned Mole Trilogy.
The Mark of the Mole draws on various tales from the Great Depression, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It opens with a radio broadcast (narrated by Penn Jilette) of a warning about a storm brewing over the lands which contain the tunnels of the Mohelmot. The Mohelmot are strange race of cloaked figures who prefer to live underground and who are known as "Moles" as a result. The storm arrives quickly and floods the Moles out of their homes, forcing them to migrate across the desert to the sea where the Chubs live.
The Chubs are a chubby, vacuous people who live for pleasure in a cozy pop culture. They embrace the arriving Moles, seeing them as a good source of cheap labour. The hard-working Moles soon alienate the Chubs, however. The latter start to complain about the Moles taking all the good work and marrying the Chubs' daughters -- all the usual redneck complaints about immigrants, of which The Residents had heard plenty when they were growing up in Louisiana. The tension between the two groups comes to a head, breaking out in a short war which resolves nothing. Afterwards, everything reverts to they way it was before the fighting, with the situation just as tense as ever.

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The Residents’ final work of their synthesizer era is Mark of the Mole, a terrifying electronic epic of a unique culture, the Mohelmot, who have been driven from their underground home by a massive storm. The unpublished novelization of Mark of the Mole by T.D. Wade brings much of the story into clear vision. In this extraction, Dydres, a young priestess of the Mohelmot race, tells the story of the Disposer and feels the first water drops of the impending disaster.

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MARK OF THE MOLE
Their way to the Melanatory took them near the idol of Disposer, tall and two-horned. The creature had somehow blundered into Havehome not long after Innisfree’s death. It was blind, probably ill, and panicked. For two or three nights it prowled the walkway and the tunnels, and whenever it smelled or heard a person, it would charge. Thirteen Mohelmot died on its terrible horns.
Eventually it worked its way to the floor of Echodrome. Many falls had left it bellowing with pain and rage. It was weak, but still dangerous. Dydres, although only a young woman, was then the highest acolyte, and had the confidence of the Melanatrix, Xecca. Though Darkness was silent to Xecca, he told Dydres that Disposer’s eyes, useless to it in the dark, were unsettling its mind. The Melanatrix asked for two volunteers with sharpened sticks to put out those eyes. One of them died, but so did Disposer, with crossed sticks hanging from its eyeholes like the protruberant meln-organs of Darkness himself. Alfray had suggested the sticks, though Dydres told the Melanatrix that Darkness had ordered their use.
Now Disposer’s bones were interred in its statue, which functioned to appease its soul. The statue also served to warn away the young or incautious from entering the Funeral Tunnel, a natural cavern whose treacherous paths lead to the Doomhole, a bottomless burial pit.
Before Dydres and Allasu reached the walls of the Melanatory, lightning had struck three more times. None of the flashes were any brighter than daylight Urxkanat, but the thunderclaps rung the mountain like a bell. People were retreating into their tunnels, as if they had lost all thought of work. The daily regimen was never interrupted except for the yearly Gathering to chant the Litanies.
Most of the twenty-seven acolytes were brave enough to come to the Melanatory. Within, it was quiet and dark. Dydres gathered them in a circle beneath the image of Darkness. They prayed with bare knees to rock, waiting for the words of Darkness to fill their empty minds. After a time the god told Dydres that the people were overly troubled by this test of faith. They should have a Gathering, right away, with chanting and with music.
Dydres raised her face to shen the image of Darkness. A drop of water suddenly hit her senozel, and she gave a cry, for she was as surprised as if lighting had struck her instead. The Melanatory was roofed, so Urxkanat could not intrude on the god or his worship. Furthermore, all the water in Havehome came, ultimately, from Kebol, a river running beneath the floor of Echodrome.
She gave quiet orders to the nearest acolyte, who was spattered by the next drop. The boy ran out the door and soon was back in.
“Melanatrix, water falls from above and runs down the outside of our temple!”
For a moment Dydres wished she had somehow told her people about thunderstorms and rain.
-T.D.Wade