Surreal Music Video

There are a few basic routes you can take when making a music video. You can show the band performing the song, or tell a story (which may or may not relate to the song itself)... or you can take the artistic path and just throw a bunch of weird stuff on the screen in time to the music.

These videos either have no story at all or random Mind Screwy stories. Many Animated Music Videos fall into this category. Usually the imagery will be intercut with or somehow involve the band performing, but sometimes they go all-out and dispense with the band shots as well.


 * The undisputed king of music video surrealism is Michel Gondry. Some examples:
 * Foo Fighters, "Everlong". Takes place partially in dreams, but not All Just a Dream as such. It involves giant phones, band members discarding false skins to reveal their true identities, nunchucks made literally from two pieces of firewood hastily chained together, and Dave Grohl (dressed as Sid Vicious) gaining a massive right hand with which to administer bitch slaps of death.
 * Chemical Brothers, "Let Forever Be." Life is tough, especially when you keep splitting into parallel selves who perform Busby Berkeley Numbers.
 * Also by them, "Star Guitar", is very surreal, but that doesn't stop it from being the coolest thing ever.
 * Not that surreal when you notice that everything is going in the beat of the music.
 * The undisputed king of horrifying music video surrealism is Chris Cunningham.
 * His most famous video is probably the one for Come To Daddy by Aphex Twin. The video features a number of children terrorising an old lady walking her dog. Each child has the face of Richard D. James.
 * He also directed another Aphex Twin clip, "Windowlicker". It features a bunch of scantily clad women all dancing rather provactively. The squick comes in, however, when you see that - again - they all have Aphex Twin's face!
 * Another video is "All Is Full of Love" by Bjork. The video is pretty simple, and features two robots kissing. The robots both have Bjork's face. It's as hot as it sounds.
 * He also directed the video for "Frozen" by Madonna, which features her dancing in a desert and turning into ravens. It's probably his least-scary video.
 * Perhaps his best video is the one for Come On My Selector by Squarepusher. Every sound in the song is synchronised to the video. The video itself is about a Japanese girl who escapes and asylum by swapping her dog's brain into one of of the guards trying to chase her. It really must be seen to be believed.
 * Chris Cunningham is also the mad genius behind Rubber Johnny, a video featuring the song "Gwarek2" by Aphex Twin (very disturbing in its own right), and a horrifically deformed child - played by Cunningham himself - convulsing and contorting impossibly in a wheelchair...So yeah.
 * He also directed the video for The Horrors' song, "Sheena is a Parasite". It involves a great deal of strobe lights (which caused the video to be banned from MTV) and as the band plays, Samantha Morton's guts spew out all over the screen.
 * And the undisputed queen of disturbing music video surrealism is undoubtedly Floria Sigismondi. Some videos worth mentioning are:
 * Marilyn Manson, "The Beautiful People". It's very creepy and surreal.
 * Incubus, "Megalomaniac". It alternates between collage-like images of the band playing in a WW 2 setting, Hitler with airplane wings and ballerina shoes, a George Bush lookalike that is eventually revealed to have an eagle head and a protesting crowd. Oh, and people with fish-heads. And a family pouring oil on a fake baby.
 * The White Stripes, "Blue Orchid". Features a model with incredibly long heels, a horse, a creepy Jack White, and Meg White eating dishes (literally).
 * As if the fact that the singer is in his 90's isn't surreal enough, The Zimmers "Firestarter" video might just constitute the most disturbing video ever.
 * Jamiroquai has an unrepentant penchant for the odd; not to mention most memorable videos of the nineties with both "Virtual Insanity" and "Feels Just Like it Should", which is not only surreal, but strangely intriguing, with both for its "The Mask" character and that Jay Kay plays all of the characters. (even the chick)
 * The Residents provide the Ur Example, having produced their own, completely bizarre promotional clips since as early as 1974.
 * Marilyn Manson's "Sweet Dreams". It can't really be described... just watch it.
 * Most of Bjork's numerous videos exhibit fascinating surrealism. The aforementioned Gondry is responsible for seven of them.
 * New Order, "True Faith", which featured a cast of dancers dressed like Oompa Loompas, needles, snails, and a dude with one leg and a TV monitor attached over his face (setting up the footage of the band playing).
 * You forgot about the effeminate male in a punching bag signing the lyrics.
 * Maybe it was made on drugs, which is what the lyrics are about.
 * While most people consider New Order to be a bunch of arty musicians who hide behind surreal images and don't do interviews/let their faces be shown in their videos, in truth the band isn't shy about appearing in their videos, just shy about giving interviews. They appear in the open in many of their music videos, notably "Perfect Kiss", which is a normal Performance Video.
 * Talk Talk, "It's My Life." Mostly footage of animals. The band's singer is seen hanging out around the zoo in some shots, but doesn't lip-sync. The record label didn't get it and forced the band to make an alternate version, with an intentionally cheesy performance overlayed over the animal footage. In spite of this, it is largely considered a breakthrouh video as it was one if not the first video to not be an out and out performance video.
 * Matchbox20, "Real World." There's a camel in a bowling alley, and an ice-cream truck selling raw meat, and...uh...other stuff.
 * Stone Temple Pilots, "Interstate Love Song." A clown escapes from a silent film, after being dumped by his girlfriend and flees across the scenery while his nose grows longer, due to his lying nature.
 * The New Pornographers' "Myriad Harbor" follows a man with a giant head of hair that grows without control, eventually growing other heads that all start singing in unison.
 * Barenaked Ladies, "One Week." Straightforward performance video in front of a royal court, until the band gets kicked out and it turns into a car chase ending with an Evel Knievel-style motorcyclist.
 * Pearl Jam's "Do The Evolution" was an Animated Music Video (directed by none other than Todd Macfarlane) that devolved quickly into apocalyptic imagery and people with skull faces.
 * Not so much "devolved quickly," as it was "instantly evolved".
 * Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" is like a whistlestop tour of early 20th Century Art, in the style of Terry Gilliam.
 * ¡Forward, Russia!'s "Nineteen" is a slow motion film of kids throwing waterbombs full of purple paint at each other.
 * Most videos for songs from the We Are Scientists album Crap Attack are like this - there's three videos of the band standing perfectly still in public places, one that is a news report resubtitled, one that's a bunch of random people dancing out of time to the music, etc.
 * ALL of We Are Scientists' videos for that matter. Especially those for the singles from their Brian Thrust Mastery album. Their bassist turns into a werewolf and wants a photo taken in Impatience, he dates a dog in After Hours and they wrangle Pomeranians in Chick Lit.
 * Practically every Beck video besides "Where It's At". Especially "Loser" and "E-Pro."
 * And "Jackass".
 * "Where It's At" had a pretty surreal video, while it wasn't incomprenshible, it's that it's hard to understand what's going on, as the video various switches to random scenes and situtations.
 * To some extent, Muse's "Knights of Cydonia". While technically it tells a story, it's a very bizarre one that seems to be entirely designed to appeal to the Rule of Cool.
 * Their video for "Muscle Museum" is made of people in an American suburb crying.
 * "Supermassive Black Hole"
 * Not even the band itself knows what the hell "Supermassive Black Hole"'s video is about, according to the making-of documentary. But it sure looked cool, so they went along with it.
 * "Uprising" features the band playing in the back of a moving truck while a scale model city blows up around them, and giant demonic teddy bears rise up from the ground.
 * MGMT's "Time To Pretend".
 * Hell, ANYTHING by MGMT. The video for "Kids" shows all kinds of hideous monsters terrorizing an infant (among other things), eventually turning into an even more surreal animated sequence. The one that makes the most sense, the video for "Electric Feel" is still quite trippy and vaguely incomprehensible (like, what the hell is the stuff that's pouring out of the Moon? And what on Earth is that one-toothed...creature?).
 * The "Electric Feel" video is fairly comprehensible up until the puppets and space motorcycles show up.
 * "Flash Delirium" starts out fairly surreal, and then descends deep into the pits of Lovecraftian what the fuck-iness, never to emerge.
 * Tears for Fears had quite a few of these, with "Sowing the Seeds of Love" and "Head over Heels" perhaps the most notable.
 * Ace of Base's "Beautiful Life". Justified in that the entire thing is a dream sequence.
 * Michael Jackson's "Black or White" starts as a fairly typical salute to The Power of Rock with Macaulay Culkin blasting dad George Wendt out of the house, but then he lands on an African plain, where Michael is dancing with tribesmen. From there it's a multiculturalism celebration, which is the point of the song, but then it breaks away for several minutes to Michael between dancing alone on a city street set (they were On a Soundstage All Along) smashing car windows and grabbing his crotch a lot. (Plus, he's morphing from a panther and back again.) Finally we learn the whole thing is a clip being watched by Bart Simpson. The controversy over the crotch-grabbing got the clip discussed by Siskel and Ebert, and they admitted that element didn't bother them so much as the fact that they had no idea what was going on.
 * The video for Wax's "California" is a single-shot slow motion take of a man on fire running down a busy street in California. Spike Jonze, the director of the video, later parlayed his fame directing music videos into making a very surreal movie.
 * Every Talking Heads video. Take for instance "Once In A Lifetime". The entire video is David Byrne doing a very unusual dance (inspired by marionettes and African rituals, and to a lesser extent epilepsy sufferers), with the rest of the band missing.
 * The Future Sound of London's "We Have Explosive". I do not want to explain it.
 * The video for Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box".
 * The video for "Watery Hands" by Superchunk parodies this trope: The concept is that the band think they're making a basic performance video in an empty room, but the directors (played by David Cross and Janeane Garafalo) surreptitiously fill it with gratuitous non sequitur green screen effects, such as super-imposing the band onto a pie or pasting the singer's head onto the body of a dog.
 * David Crowder Band's video Forever And Ever Etc is an Animated Music Video that tells a story about a battle between the band and a group of angry squirrels, all done in an Animesque style. It's weird enough as it is, but even weirder when you remember the group is a Christian band and the song is a fairly generic praise and worship song. (Think "modern church music".)
 * The Smashing Pumpkins' Georges Méliès-influenced clip for "Tonight, Tonight" features a couple in early 1900's dress using a blimp to journey into space. After they use umbrellas to parachute down to the Moon, they are captured by aliens. It just gets weirder from there.
 * Tool does this as a general rule. The best example is arguably "Parabola".
 * To elaborate, in the video for "Prison Sex" a black figure molests a smaller, paraplegic, white figure in a room made of cupboards, but in the end the white figure turns out to be in cupboard that is closed by the black figure. Their video "Aenema" features an obese business man sees a crack in an empty gray room that sprays water so he brings a bundle which he opens to reveal an alien-figure. The alien figure proceeds to develop a hose like organ that fills the room it is in full of water. Then the business man ends up taking the alien-figure and puts him in a box full of water and kicks it around. "Vicarious" is also pretty strange.
 * "Love etc." by the Pet Shop Boys definitely fits the throwing weird stuff at the screen.
 * "Can You Forgive Her? falls into the Mind Screw and Lyrics Video Mismatch categories.
 * Ditto, you know, everything else they ever did.
 * Soundgarden, "Black Hole Sun".
 * Animal Collective, "Water Curses". I don't know, you figure it out.
 * Most of the band's other videos (as well as their entire discography in general) are just as surreal, notably the clips for "Peacebone", "Summertime Clothes" and "Brother Sport".
 * Interpol, "The Heinrich Maneuver". The video begins in the middle of the story line, on a closeup of the main subject's face. From here, the main character goes forward in the story, while the background characters go backwards in motion (you see looks of freight frozen on their faces at the beginning, which is explained later in the video as it is revealed the main character ). Oh, and it's all in super slow motion of what we're led to believe is about 20 seconds of action slowed down to the length of the song.
 * Radiohead seem to especially love this trope, as seen with their videos for "Karma Police", "Knives Out", "There There" and "Just", among many others.
 * Without a doubt, their strangest video has to be Push Pulk/ Spinning Plates. It is impossible to describe in words alone.
 * Santigold, "L.E.S. Artistes". It's an homage to The Holy Mountain, which is pretty much all you need to know about in terms of surreality.
 * Florence + the Machine, the original video for "Dog Days Are Over". Florence wakes up in a forest wearing a tuxedo and then get's chased by creepy clowns who then dress her as a clown.
 * Massive Attack has put out a couple: "Karmacoma" is a string of weird, inexplicable scenes in a hotel, some of which are homages to The Shining. "Teardrop" would be a straightforward Performance Video if the song weren't being "performed" by a lip-syncing CGI fetus.
 * Miley Cyrus song "Start All Over" music video is just one long shot with random junk all over the place
 * Crazy Loop has two crazy videos. One is for the song "Mm-ma-ma," the story of a pizza guy delivering a pizza to a fashion shoot. After being insulted, he dresses up in some spare clothes lying around and completely impresses the crowd. The other video, "Shut Up" makes a little bit of sense at the start, but then dwells into the singer changing from a doll to a doll-like person... as well as making several dolls come to life with duct tape covering their mouths. To add to the madness, this is all happening in a kid's slumber party that was originally no fun.
 * The video for The Birthday Massacre's Blue. We start out with Chibi (the lead singer) alone in a nursery wearing bunny ears, and tearing the arms off dolls to use as crude crayons in order to draw a path through a drawn maze under the rug she's on. Then we switch to a claymation world of dolls wondering around in a maze. Cut to a couple close ups of the other band members looking ominous (and floating), and then Chibi reaches through a hole in the floor full of black... stuff... into the claymation world, grabs a rope connected to one of the dolls and starts trying to pull it through the hole (which is much too small), until its head comes off. We then switch back to the real world, and see that Chibi's severed head is lying on the floor, several feet from her body. We're as confused as you are.
 * And then there's the video for Looking Glass, which starts out by showing the band dancing around with their instruments, then shifts to a classroom where a bunch of masked schoolgirls with numbers on their foreheads are being lectured by a masked teacher. One girl, Six, leaves the room, and goes to her locker, where she draws a heart around a picture of the teacher. Then she goes into an empty classroom, removes her mask and proceeds to put her hand through the checkerboard projection. She then wakes up in the same room with the band, Chibi gives her an apple, and they escorts her back to class, where all the girls have turned into life-sized dolls and the teacher is sticking nails into the back of doll Thirteen's head, causing her to cry blood. The final shot shows the apple melting on the teacher's desk.
 * Just about all of Dragon Force (video game)'s videos are this to some degree. Example.
 * Tori Amos' "Caught a Lite Sneeze" manages to be more surreal than any of Bjork's music videos combined! It has to be seen to believed.
 * Also, "A Sorta Fairytale", which is a rather twisted love story. Tori Amos is a leg that falls in love with an arm (Adrien Brody), and they eventually transform into full human beings.
 * The black and white version of "Cornflake Girl" wasn't released in the US because it was too surreal.
 * Same deal for "Glory of the 80s" which is up there with "No Scrubs" by TLC for having absolutely nothing to do with the song.
 * Grizzly Bear's Knife and Two Weeks.
 * Lemon Demon's song, Word Dissasociation features this to go along with its Word Salad Lyrics, with the words written on scraps of paper which are lying around in completely random places, such as a watermelon, a chandelier, and...well, just watch the video.
 * Possibly the ultimate example of this trope is Neil Cicierega's masterpiece BRODYQUEST. Adrien Brody takes a walk across the world... and space... and through the sun... and to the centre of the universe? Which he then proceeds to assimilate or... something.
 * The music video for Megadeth's Train of Consequences as seen here Over all it looks like the director got done watching Jacob's Ladder before he did the video.
 * Too Much Joy's "Making Fun Of Bums", which among other things features ridiculous jumpsuits, a member plugging his guitar into another member's mouth and electrocuting him, another member standing in front of a propped up mattress with a sign reading "I am dreaming", someone dressed as a painter walking into frame for no reason, and lengthy bookends of the band just standing around in rain gear at a fishing pier. The band disliked how it came out, but couldn't make a second video, so they just added snarky subtitles about how little sense it all made ("Maybe you should just close your eyes and listen to the song").
 * "Push It" by Garbage. Assassins dressed as nuns and a guy with a lightbulb for a head are just two examples.
 * The same director, Andrea Giacobbe, did a genuinely unsettling video for Death in Vegas' "Dirt".
 * The clip for "Ambling Alp" by Yeasayer is basically one bizarre thing after the other. There's one part of the video that's far less surreal than the rest of it if you know what the song's about.
 * Short Stack, Ladies and Gentlemen. Involves a hospital, the band, some sexy nurses, some fucked-up x-ray scenes, and secret doorways.
 * Panic! at the Disco's Nine in the Afternoon has the guys waking in color-coded bedrooms and that's around the time things stop to make any sort of sense.
 * Word of God says that it's All Just a Dream; every time one of them wakes up, he has a dream about performing the song, then it goes to the next, then the next, then the next. Which just means that they have some pretty fucked up dreams.
 * Neon Horse Cuckoo Consists of large man who may or may not actually be the lead singer in heavy make up singing, A guy in a paper crown hat reading newspapers, comic books, and having nightmares, bad special effects monsters, blindfolded kids playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with knives, said kids dancing with make up guy, and make up guy dressed as Santa dropping a lizard down a chimney, which becomes a dragon.
 * The Replacements, "Bastards of Young". A mostly still shot of a stereo system playing the song at the wrong speed. At one point a guy walks in and smokes a cigarette on the couch. Later, he kicks the speaker in and leaves. The end.
 * Just about anything from the The Eighties. Animotion's "Obssession" is a good example.
 * So is Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer".
 * Blancmange's "Lose Your Love". The singers randomly tearing apart furniture... and what the hell is going on with his legs at the 1:45 mark?
 * Lady Gaga. Anything and everything by Lady Gaga. To be more precise, starting from Paparazzi.
 * This Stop Motion video for Finn Riggins' Wake (Keep This Town Alive).
 * Several videos directed by Mark Romanek qualify, but especially his work with Trent Reznor.
 * The Avalanches' "Frontier Psychiatrist". Appropriate, given that it's a surreal song.
 * Of Montreal LOVES this trope. Gronlandic Edit is an outstanding example. What in the hell is going on? I have no idea. No one has any idea. Most of their videos are like this.
 * You can wrestle An Eluardian Instance into some kind of sense, but...that's really the only one.
 * They Might Be Giants gives us Birdhouse In Your Soul. The song itself is surreal enough (supposedly, it's about a nightlight), so it's quite an accomplishment that the video managed to be even weirder. For extra fun, the fan-made literal video version sums it up pretty well.
 * "No New Kinda Story" by Starflyer 59. If you aren't familiar with The Seventh Seal, it will make no sense whatsoever. If you are familiar with The Seventh Seal... you'll still be wondering what's up with those horse-head guys and the random shots of a hammer smashing things.
 * California Gurls by Katy Perry definitely qualifies. A peppy ode to California seems pretty straightforward until Snoop Dogg stars playing some twisted version of Candyland. A gummi bear flipping off the artist seals the deal.
 * Better yet, E.T..
 * OK Go has a lot of these. Their catalog is about half surreal videos, half amazing choreography (like their treadmills video for "Here it Goes Again"). Surreal ones include Do What You Want, in which everything is wallpaper, End Love's bizarre stop motion, and the appropriately-titled WTF?, which makes use of delayed image. Also, every one of their videos is shot in one take. Every single one.
 * Nogu Svelo's Haru Mamburu. Combined with gibberishy, yet oddly catchy lyrics.
 * "The Inside of You" by The Maine has a monocrome boy recives a kaleidoscope from his (hinted at being dead)grampa, and when he looks at his boring party guests through it he sees surreal full color versions of them in costumes, and sees a whole party of circus performers in his backyard.
 * The video for Sean Lennon's cover of "Would I Be The One", which is part of an already surreal video collection called Friendly Fire, features animated versions of Sean and his friends traveling to a distant planet on a carnival ride and being captured by aliens. However, the high levels of Mind Screw were inevitable given that it's an homage to Fantastic Planet.
 * The video for Disturbed's "Asylum" borders on this. Schizophrenic and undercrank-heavy camera editing give the insane delusions within a deranged and erratic quality similar to psychosis. The brutality of the asylum's doctors and staff add a sadistic touch.
 * Appropriately enough given their bizarre music and lyrics, The Flaming Lips have some surreal videos, such as this one for the Yeah Yeah Yeah song, featuring a dictator setting starving sumo wrestlers on a man covered with burgers, amongst other oddities...
 * Fall Out Boy's videos are almost all surreal. A few examples include
 * "Sugar, We're Goin Down," about a girl who befriends a boy with antlers (according to some this is a metaphor for the boy's homosexuality);
 * "Thnks fr th Mmrs," in whioch the band is replaced by monkeys at a video shoot; and most notably
 * "America's Suitehearts," which depicts the band members in a cartoon universe and according to Pete Wentz was based on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
 * Nu Shooz' "I Can't Wait". As the artists themselves put it: "this video still has people wondering why a dog is in sunglasses."
 * RATATAT with their song, Shempi. It's a nose-dive into the Uncanny Valley after having suffered serious head-trauma.
 * IAMX and Imogen Heap collaborated and created a song called 'My Secret Friend'. The video has Chris dressed as a girl, Imogen dressed as a guy, and some really fucked up scenery. It's the little details that make it so crazy.
 * Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" is a fun song that's great to dance to. It also has a profoundly disturbing music video with monkeys with the band's face in some kind of insane medical testing facility.
 * The Used has "The Bird And The Worm", which apparently has the singer having to deal with a clone of himself with black hair, and his couch trying to eat him. The ending is Grade A Uncanny Valley, with the singer looking through his room's peephole to see his clone spiderwalking backwards. The creepy chuckle at the end makes it worse.
 * If the David Bowie video you're watching is post-1979 and not a Concept Video, there's a good chance it's this. Examples include "Fashion", "Loving the Alien", "Miracle Goodnight", "Hallo Spaceboy", and "Little Wonder".
 * The video for Low's song "Breaker" was filmed in someone's kitchen, from a single angle, in real-time. The two supporting band members clap to the rhythm of the song while the lead singer, who is wearing a military jacket, eats an entire birthday cake within the duration of the song. Your guess is as good as mine.
 * The real Ur Example is "Strawberry Fields Forever" by The Beatles. Climbing a tree, pouring paint on a piano...
 * Adele - Rolling in the Deep. Adele sitting in an unfinished room, water glasses vibrating to the music, dishes being smashed against a projector screen, a ninja sword-dancing in chalk dust, and pyrotechnic sprinklers lighting a paper cityscape on fire.
 * This is indeed part of iamamiwhoami's schtick as an artistic unit.
 * Fireflies by Owl City.
 * Ever feel like Japanese media was becoming too normal for you? Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's "PONPONPON" is here to fix that.
 * The strange colors and designs that appear in Windows Media Player.
 * A lot of The White Stripes' videos, particularly in their indie period.
 * Full, vocalist of Guniw Tools directed one for every single song in their discography.
 * The music video for Suzanne Vega's "Tired of Sleeping" is rather absurd, with no discernible meaning.
 * Chad Vangaalen composed, recorded, and created the animated video for "Molten Light"—a quiet little ballad of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, and monstrous supernatural justice—whose folk-style acoustic melody is a chilling contrast to the high octane nightmare fuel of the lyrics and visuals.
 * "(Sub)urban Train" by DJ Tiesto. Tiesto walks through town, the townspeople are glowing with a strange electrical aura, then they all start levitating. At the end, he walks into an art studio where a woman is painting the same scene.
 * Metallica's video for "Until It Sleeps" is full of imagery taken from the surreal paintings of 16th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.
 * Hold It Against Me by Britney Spears is called this
 * Any Genki Rockets video.
 * Faith No More has some pretty weird videos, especially "Epic".
 * Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Can't Stop".
 * Carnival of Rust
 * Aerosmith has "Pink" and "Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees)". "Livin' On The Edge" is mostly a Concept Video but it also has some surreal imagery as part of the footage of the band performing.
 * Jessie J has "Price Tag" and "Nobody's Perfect".
 * Autechre's "Gantz Graf"(actually inspired by a drug trip) and "Second Bad Vilbel", as well as most Fan Vids set to their songs.
 * The Melvins' "Bar X The Rocking M" involves imagery associated with the Day Of The Dead mixed in with actors dressed as nuns, angels, devils, skeletons, and pigs. "The Talking Horse" meanwhile, has a Mind Screw of a plot that seems to spoof conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and reptiloids, then throws in lip-syncing scenery for good measure. Even when they do relatively straightforward Performance Videos there always seems to be a few cuts to surrealist imagery.
 * Many Primus videos.
 * Dir En Grey's "Obscure" is pure NSFW nightmare fuel surrealism (Spoiler text is there FOR YOUR SAFETY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:)  How everything relates to everything else, God only knows.
 * Kerli - Zero Gravity; be warned, potential Nightmare Fuel (and you thought Lady Gaga was freaky).
 * Dead Letter Circus' video for "Big" falls squarely into this. If another troper can explain what's going on, by all means, because this one sure can't.
 * Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)." There's Pete Burns alternating between a kimono and an eye patch and then sprouting four extra golden arms, a disco ball popping up, and guys in purple tunics twirling banners in the air. And that's the whole video.
 * Ayla - Ayla Part 2.
 * Erasure's "Always". Andy Bell descends on a Wuxia-themed snowscape, defrosts a frozen princess, changes the season to spring with a magic snowglobe, does Wire Fu gymnastics, levitation and flower arranging, etc.
 * A-ha's "Take On Me" involves a woman being pulled into a comic book world by the animated Morten Harkett, then he breaks into the real world at the end. The video for A1's cover is even better, moving the setting to Tron-style Cyberspace.
 * Two Against One by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi. In it, a hunter witnesses the psychedelic murders of his family members by the ghost of a deer he killed.
 * St.Olie, "Икра" (Caviar), an Animated Music Video directed by Khariton Klimov, a director from Syktyvkar, Komi Republic, Russia. (NSFW)
 * BTS' MV for "IDOL" is filled with neon colors, the band dancing atop of a tower made of CGI clones of themselves and then multiplying themselves during a certain part of the choreography, giant versions of them surrounding a small scenario, a tiger jumping the screen serving as a screen wipe, the band dancing in an aquarium while being attacked by a shark, members appearing with Instagram-like cartoon filters and V having a pink-blonde bicolor hair-do. Apparently the video is very symbolic and has a lot of cultural and band-related references, but you can be forgiven by not catchy any of these over the onslaught of sugar and LSD. The one for the version with featured rapper Nicky Minaj only adds her sitting in a sofa somewhere in the same colorful wonderland while her verses appear in subbed Korean on the screen, which make as much sense as the rest.
 * The Comeback Trailers for all their albums also tend to be in the surreal side of things.