History Main / SurrealMusicVideo

* Music/OKGo 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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAQZ_uui1SY Do What You Want]], in which everything is wallpaper, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2fpgpanZAw End Love's]] bizarre stop motion, and the appropriately-titled [[https://www.youtube.com/user/OkGo#p/u/19/12zJw9varYE WTF?]], which makes use of delayed image. Also, every one of their videos is shot in one take. Every single one. (Except for the ones before "A Million Ways", which are itself still this trope)

* Music/PearlJam's "Do The Evolution" was an AnimatedMusicVideo (directed by none other than [[Creator/ToddMacFarlane]]) that devolved quickly into apocalyptic imagery and people with skull faces.

** The video for "Telegraph Ave. (Oakland by Lloyd)" mostly fits with the themes of the song, following Gambino on vacation with Jhene Aiko, until the last minute, where Gambino [[spoiler: is revealed to be an alien.]]

* Music/LadyGaga: ''Anything'' and ''everything'' from "Paparazzi" onward.

* Music/LadyGaga. ''Anything'' and ''everything'' by Music/LadyGaga. To be more precise, starting from "Paparazzi".

* Austra's "I Am Not Waiting" alternates between a psychedelic-patterned female silhouette performing a striptease, and singer Katie Stelmanis's head projecting from a Greco-Roman column against a similarly trippy background, with additional kaleidoscope effects applied to her face and mouth. The ending reveals that Katie was OnASoundstageAllAlong and the psychedelic figure is a dancer in a chroma key zentai suit.

* Clean Bandit made two music videos for "Solo", and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JnfIa84TnU the first one]] qualifies: member Grace Chatto gets revenge on an abusive boyfriend... by tainting his dinner with a concoction that turns him into a psychedelic rainbow golden retriever. There's also a couple of unexplained scenes of Grace's face evaporating [[note]]since these scenes are juxtaposed with the rest of the band mixing smoking beakers, this might mean they're using part of her essence as an ingredient[[/note]].

* Clean Bandit made two music videos for "Solo", and the first one qualifies: member Grace Chatto gets revenge on an abusive boyfriend... by tainting his dinner with a concoction that turns him into a psychedelic rainbow golden retriever. There's also a couple of unexplained scenes of Grace's face evaporating.

*** Special mention goes to his video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnVf1ZoCJSo Shock the Monkey]].
* The real Ur Example is "Strawberry Fields Forever" by Music/TheBeatles. Climbing a tree, pouring paint on a piano...

* Andrea Giacobb, did a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqh7U8R4RUM genuinely unsettling video]] for Death in Vegas' "Dirt".

** "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.

* Music/NewOrder, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og1HAkjOuL0 "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.
*** [[WhatDoYouMeanItWasntMadeOnDrugs Maybe it was made on drugs]], which is what the lyrics are about.

* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y77L8ZGh0I "(Sub)urban Train"]] by DJ Tiesto. Tiesto walks through town, the townspeople are [[PowerGlows glowing]] with a strange electrical aura, then they all start [[PowerFloats levitating]]. At the end, he walks into an art studio where a woman is painting the same scene.
* Music/{{Metallica}}'s video for "Until It Sleeps" is full of imagery taken from the surreal paintings of 16th century Dutch painter Creator/HieronymusBosch.
* Any Genki Rockets video.
* Music/FaithNoMore has some pretty weird videos, especially "Epic".
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKk1u5RMTn4 Carnival of Rust]]
* Music/JessieJ has "Price Tag" and "Nobody's Perfect".
* Music/{{Melvins}}' "Bar X The Rocking M" involves imagery associated with [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead the Day Of The Dead]] mixed in with actors dressed as nuns, angels, devils, skeletons, and pigs. Meanwhile, "The Talking Horse" has a {{mindscrew}} of a plot that seems to spoof conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and [[ReptilianConspiracy reptiloids]], then throws in lip-syncing scenery for good measure. Even when they do relatively straightforward {{Performance Video}}s there always seem to be a few cuts to surrealist imagery.
* Many Music/{{Primus}} videos.
* Music/DirEnGrey's "Obscure" is pure NSFW nightmare fuel surrealism: foetuses growing on and being plucked from trees, foetus-shaped dildos being used to rape women till they bleed from the mouth, body horror involving tentacle-beings walking through walls and sawing through women strapped to tables, and the band vocalist Kyo vomiting with every word he utters. How everything relates to everything else, God only knows. Other notable and equally MindScrew-y videos of theirs are "[[DerangedAnimation Agitated Screams of Maggots]]" and "[[{{Hentai}} Different Sense]]".
* Music/{{Kerli}}'s [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXMeZwO2qZ0 Walking on Air]] and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEkS_mQ0GlI&ob=av2e Zero Gravity]]; be warned, potential NightmareFuel (and you thought Music/LadyGaga was freaky).
* Dead Letter Circus' video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBPqjkle6U8 "Big"]] falls squarely into this. If another troper can explain what's going on, by all means, because this one sure can't.
* Music/DeadOrAlive's "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUatnbaNfEo 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.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU9HjiyKnZw Ayla - "Ayla Part 2"]] consists of a mysterious woman in [[EtherealWhiteDress white]] [[ThreeMinutesOfWrithing gyrating]], holding a strange shiny object, and teleporting to various locales around the world.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF_C7BvAf_A 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.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqP2-w6AWS4 Belong]] by Washed Out. Film/{{Xanadu}} aerobics workout disco dance contest in space sums it up.
* "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ow0bA4H3BQ Heartbeats]] by Music/TheKnife starts with kids skateboarding down a hill, then switches to animated birds flying over a monochrome landscape, superimposes that on top of the initial footage, then finally shows a locomotive driving over more monochrome terrain and emitting rainbow-colored polyhedrons in place of smoke.
** Their "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=617ANIA5Rqs We Share Our Mother's Health]]" video is an animated nightmare of stark black, white, and blood-red backgrounds featuring abstract birds, marching near-faceless red-and-black figures, and endless rows of surgical impliments.
* At some point ''Music/{{Knorkator}}'' started making music videos, which usually tend to be even weirder than the lyrics themselves. The most surreal would probably be ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm4WQkJOlS0 Weg nach unten]]'' which seems to be about a person escaping from the world by digging a tunnel deep into the earth, away from everything. While digging a tunnel does appear in one part of the video, it has no other connections to the lyrics, and is really, really weird. [[note]]Yes, that ending show accidentally digging all the way to Australia.[[/note]] It also happens to be the [[TrueArtIsIncomprehensible most artistic of their videos.]]
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkyYxAv6kB4 "When the Night Falls"]] by Chromeo has Solange Knowles and every other woman the band encounters getting [[ExpressDelivery instantly preggo]] via ThePowerOfRock, followed by Dave getting the [[MisterSeahorse MPreg]] treatment just before he [[AllJustADream awakens from the nightmare]].
* In Music/KidCudi's "Day 'N Nite (Crookers remix)" video, Cudi's character, while working the graveyard shift at a drug store, envisions the customers as {{stripperific}} erotic dancers.
* Extrawelt's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zks1H8jeO4 Raum in Raum]]. A DeliberatelyMonochrome video of a guy and a girl running around an old factory, turning switches and dials, and making kaleidoscope patterns with fabric, among other random things. The final shot has the girl BoundAndGagged.
** Even more trippy: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jek0HCeFGy0 Was Übrig Bleibt]].
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTwlAT_AwU This]] video for Ladytron's "Destroy Everything You Touch". It appears to be about frost giants that have been fused to mountains and a lady with a blizzard hidden in her dress.
* Armin van Buuren's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfgnh7Thp-A Blue Fear]] is a MindScrew overall, but the main SurrealHorror attraction begins when a giant floating mummy head emerges from a ''Franchise/{{Hellraiser}}''-esque box and chases an Asian-looking girl around a hedge maze.
* The Break Up's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qot54Cxiy4s My Machine]] intercuts between standard [[PerformanceVideo performance footage]], the two lead band members, who are wearing cellophane wrap outfits and UncannyValleyMakeup, hooked up to a tangle of wires and coming to life Film/{{Frankenstein|1931}}-style, milk splashing on on the singer's heads forwarding and rewinding, the male lead doing the robot dance while plugging a circuit board into a computer, and the camera [[ShakyPOVCam zooming along the wires and tubes]], concluding with the singers disconnecting the machine (hence the lyrics).
* Most (if not all) of Project Pitchfork's videos are this, as well as being NightmareFuel. Such as [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY9eSzB-KbU Timekiller]], [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiSCESP9uAk&feature=relmfu Renascence]], and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aJ85G81m70 Lament]]
* Cabin Crew's "Star to Fall" consists mainly of [[{{Stripperific}} scantily clad]] [[ThreeMinutesOfWrithing flight stewardesses performing a]] BusbyBerkeleyNumber.
* The majority of {{demoscene}} productions are this set to electronic dance music.
* [[Music/EgoLikeness Ego Likeness's]] "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R5MuQh3BSw Treacherous Thing]]" video has Donna Lynch [[ChewingTheScenery going completely nuts]], randomly cuts to [[NightmareFace close ups of her face while she is]] [[BloodFromTheMouth coughing up blood and red stones]] [[TearsOfBlood with red ''tears'' down her face]], while Steven Archer does [[TheStoic nothing but sit very still with a blank face.]]
* The video for Creator/DavidLynch's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IugOfDBWcGc "Good Day Today"]], which is surprisingly not directed by Lynch himself, but has a lot of his signature style. One particularly creepy scene has a boy's father sitting in the dark watching television; when the father leans forward it's revealed [[EyeScream he has empty eye sockets]], and then the mother takes his eyes out of a frying pan and offers them up as a meal. However, once it's revealed that a large portion of the video was [[AllJustADream just a highly symbolic daydream]] of the viewpoint character, the surreal imagery starts to make sense - it's just about a boy feeling neglected by his family.

* Music/{{Bastille}}: "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOrbfQpdLKo Good Grief]]". The music video starts off with lead singer Dan Smith trying to call someone on a pay-phone, then quickly veers off into complete and utter MindScrew involving female roller skaters, burning buildings, [[LivingToys giant living teddy bears]], game shows, bank robberies, and [[LosingYourHead Dan's disembodied head]] [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking lying on the ground by some sports equipment]]. All this set to the eponymous song: [[LyricalDissonance an upbeat song about grieving after losing a loved one]]. You may need a shower after watching it...and that's only the uncensored version.

* Music/NewOrder, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og1HAkjOuL0 "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.
*** [[WhatDoYouMeanItWasntMadeOnDrugs 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 PerformanceVideo.
* Music/MatchboxTwenty, "Real World." There's a camel in a bowling alley, and an ice-cream truck selling raw meat, and... uh... other stuff.
** The same band's "Unwell" is apparently about a schizophrenic, and it shows.
* Music/TheNewPornographers' "Myriad Harbor" follows an animated Dan Bejar with a giant head of hair that grows without control, eventually growing other heads that all start singing in unison.
* Music/PearlJam's "Do The Evolution" was an AnimatedMusicVideo (directed by none other than [[Creator/ToddMacFarlane]]) that devolved quickly into apocalyptic imagery and people with skull faces.
* Music/FranzFerdinand's "Take Me Out" is like a whistlestop tour of early 20th Century Art, in the style of Creator/TerryGilliam.
* ¡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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH-RG1lWc0I Impatience]], he dates a dog in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv2_LSIujHk After Hours]] and they wrangle Pomeranians in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIyLWDhxXoQ Chick Lit]].
* Music/TheCure. Any music video, and I really mean any video. Pick one. Highlights include the second version of "Close to Me", in which the bandmates go under the sea and essentially do battle with a dazzling variety of technicolour marine life, and "The 13th", involving guys in wedding dresses having a fight with Robert Smith looking on. The latter gets even more surreal when you take into account the fact that the song is basically a typical sex-driven Cure song. {{Squick}} central.
* To some extent, Music/{{Muse}}'s "Music/KnightsOfCydonia". While technically it tells a story, it's a very bizarre one that seems to be entirely designed to appeal to the RuleOfCool.
** 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.
* Music/{{MGMT}}'s [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVnRzEjpUmE "Time To Pretend",]] from ''Music/OracularSpectacular''.
** Hell, ANYTHING by MGMT. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad-tgbtbCEM The video for "Kids",]] also from ''Oracular'' 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, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtUI5MC9tVM&NR=1 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.
** "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvSMp7T2Kes Flash Delirium]]" starts out fairly surreal, and then descends deep into the pits of Lovecraftian [[MindScrew what the fuck-iness]], never to emerge.
** And then there's "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBu_bzxvgdI Alien Days]]" from the self-titled. Even without the aliens eating the birth-balls, and the FUCKING ALIENS, there is still what happens to Andrews eyes on the spinny machine. Eyes shouldn't do that...
* Music/MichaelJackson's "Black or White" starts as a fairly typical salute to ThePowerOfRock 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 OnASoundstageAllAlong) 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 [[Main/TheSimpsons 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 "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPT7q825gwI 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 [[Film/BeingJohnMalkovich very surreal movie]].
* The Future Sound of London's "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc9l7pygQRo We Have Explosive]]". I do not want to explain it.
* The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9mJF1U3wRU video]] for Music/{{Nirvana}}'s "Heart Shaped Box" with creepy versions of the Teletubbies.
* The video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIoafYpHeYs "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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id76Qhu7AGQ Forever And Ever Etc]] is an AnimatedMusicVideo 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".)
* Music/TheSmashingPumpkins' Creator/GeorgesMelies-influenced clip for "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsZYqaSc4cU Tonight, Tonight]]" features a couple (Creator/TomKenny and his real-life wife Jill Talley) 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.
* Music/{{Tool}} does this as a general rule. The best example is arguably "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiV_ue-PbL4 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 a cupboard that is closed by the black figure. Their video "[=Æ=]nema" features an obese business man who 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.
* "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InBiaRBUjUs Love etc.]]" by the Music/PetShopBoys definitely fits the throwing weird stuff at the screen.
** "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guD4qVANYOo Can You Forgive Her?]] falls into the MindScrew and LyricsVideoMismatch categories.
** Ditto, you know, everything else they ever did.
* Music/{{Soundgarden}}, "Black Hole Sun".
** Most of the band's other videos (as well as their entire discography in general) are just as surreal, notably the clips for "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxvGHQHiY70 Peacebone]]", "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxhaRgJUMl8 Summertime Clothes]]" and "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGQjyGT1-mc 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 fright frozen on their faces at the beginning, which is explained later in the video as it is revealed the main character [[spoiler:had stepped in the path of a bus and has most likely been killed]]). 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.
* Music/{{Radiohead}} seem to especially love this trope, as seen with their videos for "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LeLAELIxKY Karma Police]]", "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vgMYcMROcc Knives Out]]", "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs1DX32t38c There There]]" and "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFLtNYI3Ls Just]]", among many others.
** Without a doubt, their strangest video has to be [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih2Ftq3hJoI&ob=av3e Push Pulk/ Spinning Plates]]. It is [[MindScrew impossible]] [[BodyHorror to]] describe in words alone.
* Music/{{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.
* Music/FlorenceAndTheMachine , 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.
* Music/MassiveAttack has put out a couple: "Karmacoma" is a string of weird, inexplicable scenes in a hotel, some of which are homages to ''Film/TheShining''. "Teardrop" would be a straightforward PerformanceVideo if the song weren't being "performed" by a lip-syncing CGI fetus.
* Music/MileyCyrus song "Start All Over" music video is just [[TheOner one long shot]] with random junk all over the place.
** Taken UpToEleven with her video for "[[http://www.vevo.com/watch/miley-cyrus/we-cant-stop/USRV81300234 We Can't Stop]]".
** Not as bad as other examples, but "Wrecking Ball" involves her crying at the camera alongside shots of her riding a wrecking ball naked and licking(!!!) a sledgehammer.
** " [[https://youtu.be/dEfDF_6cVjs Lighter]]" from ''Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz'' takes it UpToEleven.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDygS0a6Tgo The Riddle]] by Nik Kershaw is screwy from beginning to end, with the singer rambling around in a nonsensical house filled with weird items, of which none have the slightest to do with the song. The song itself is a string of WordSalad lyrics. The end of the video? It turns out the house Kershaw was trapped in was a question mark, picked up by none other than ''The Riddler'' of Franchise/{{Batman}} fame. The same Riddler shows up a number of times, along with figures from Literature/AliceInWonderland. Does not make the video more understandable, though.
* ''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.
* Music/TheBirthdayMassacre:
** The video for ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmDgtJyc1U 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 wandering 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 ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SREZ-ggSDjM 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 [[ThirteenIsUnlucky Thirteen's]] head, causing her to cry blood. The final shot shows the apple melting on the teacher's desk.
* Just about all of Music/DragonForce's videos are this to some degree. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYJQ8TzI4t0 Example]].
* Music/ToriAmos' [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weWtRqoSUOI "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, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxlIDwnPu7U "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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR_yaitV5b4#movie_player "Cornflake Girl"]] wasn't released in the US because it was too surreal.
** Same deal for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRgYEYAh53Q&feature=channel "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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuYZbYtAl9A Knife]] and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjecYugTbIQ Two Weeks]].
* Music/LemonDemon's song, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRisDso99s0 Word Dissasociation]] features this to go along with its WordSaladLyrics, with the words written on scraps of paper which are lying around in completely random places, such as a watermelon, a chandelier, stuck to a piece of tape, inside a toaster and...well, just watch the video.
** Possibly the ultimate example of this trope is Neil Cicierega's masterpiece [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygI-2F8ApUM 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 Music/{{Megadeth}}[='=]s Train of Consequences as seen [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hb0sRSVjFs here]] Over all it looks like the director got done watching ''Film/JacobsLadder'' 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 afford to scrap the video and start over, so they just added snarky subtitles (such as "Maybe you should close your eyes and just listen to the song" or "Help, I'm trapped in a bad special effect").
** The same director, Andrea Giacobbe, did a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqh7U8R4RUM genuinely unsettling video]] for Death in Vegas' "Dirt".
* The clip for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w-LmPa3h88 "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 [[GeniusBonus you know what the song's about]]. [[spoiler: The song is about the [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarII wartime]] boxer Joe Louis and his most famous rivals Primo "The Ambling Alp" Carnera and Max Schmelling, but you'd never get that from the mostly vague lyrics or the seemingly out-of-place footage of the mirror-face boxers.]]
* Music/PanicAtTheDisco's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCto3PCn8wo Nine in the Afternoon]] has the guys waking in color-coded bedrooms and that's around the time things stop making any sort of sense. WordOfGod says that it's AllJustADream; 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. The actual ideas for them came from their friend and frequent collaborator Shane Drake. He explained that all the visuals "just came to him" while he was dancing around his house one day - that apparently includes the medieval women assaulting Brendon and the truly disturbing animal heads.
** In addition to that, there's the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AZxUtZ2ZgI fifties-theme video where everyone has fish tank heads]] and, more recently, the video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUc_jXBD9DU Miss Jackson]] that takes a rather dark turn at the final chorus. If you're wondering whether the band has an explanation for that video - nope. Brendon can only offer "I guess I had a lot of anger. So I [[spoiler: chopped a girl's head off]]".
* Neon Horse ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzVFwmIvBqM 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, "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl9KQ1Mub6Q Bastards of Young]]". [[LeaveTheCameraRunning 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 TheEighties. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5Lec3m1pLY Animotion's "Obssession"]] is a good example.
** So is Peter Gabriel's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1tTN-b5KHg "Sledgehammer"]].
*** Special mention goes to his video for [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnVf1ZoCJSo Shock the Monkey]].
** Blancmange's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N81UChK78WY "Lose Your Love"]]. The singers randomly tearing apart furniture... and what the hell is going on with his legs at the 1:45 mark?
** Music/BillyJoel was one of the first to go surreal with his videos; 1982's "Pressure" has people falling into water - ''sideways'' - a young boy getting sucked into a television set, water gushing out of a school desk and Billy himself writhing in anger at a disembodied movie screen.
* Music/LadyGaga. ''Anything'' and ''everything'' by Music/LadyGaga. To be more precise, starting from "Paparazzi".
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbCLaGnR_vY This]] StopMotion video for Finn Riggins' Wake (Keep This Town Alive).
* Several videos directed by Mark Romanek qualify, but especially his work with [[Music/NineInchNails Trent Reznor.]]
* The Avalanches' [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8BWBn26bX0 "Frontier Psychiatrist"]]. Appropriate, given that it's a surreal ''song''.
* Of Montreal LOVES this trope. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBfgQvM7wtE&feature=fvst 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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpYQioEnfDQ&a=QgUfChIiJwE&playnext_from=ML An Eluardian Instance]] into some kind of sense, but... that's really the only one.
* Music/TheyMightBeGiants gives us [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAbZzdalZh4&feature=related "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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhJVAFIMnkc&playnext_from=TL&videos=NbsFkV9cEQw literal video version]] sums it up pretty well.
** Don't forget "Don't Let's Start". Five words: Dancing William Allen White heads.
** "Ana Ng" looks like a cross between a David Lynch film and the title sequence for an educational kids' show.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwE-SLnLkqY 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, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Sd5c4o9UM E.T.]].
* Music/OKGo 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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAQZ_uui1SY Do What You Want]], in which everything is wallpaper, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2fpgpanZAw End Love's]] bizarre stop motion, and the appropriately-titled [[https://www.youtube.com/user/OkGo#p/u/19/12zJw9varYE WTF?]], which makes use of delayed image. Also, every one of their videos is shot in one take. Every single one. (Except for the ones before "A Million Ways", which are itself still this trope)
* Nogu Svelo's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uXUvujG5V8 Haru Mamburu]]. Combined with [[SingingSimlish gibberishy]], yet oddly catchy lyrics.
* "The Inside of You" by The Maine has a monochrome 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 [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qygCpU6MKZg "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 MindScrew were inevitable given that it's an homage to ''Animation/FantasticPlanet''.
** His video for his earlier single [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awoTylLBF9I "Home"]], which features Sean walking bent backwards, running "underwater" with goldfishes swimming around... Just watch it.
* Appropriately enough given their bizarre music and lyrics, The Music/FlamingLips have some surreal videos, such as [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjrUOlK2714&ob=av2e this one]] for the Yeah Yeah Yeah song, featuring a dictator setting starving sumo wrestlers on a man covered with burgers, amongst other oddities...
* Music/FallOutBoy's videos are almost all surreal. A few examples include:
** "Sugar, We're Goin Down," about a girl who befriends a boy with antlers (this has been interpreted by some as a metaphor for the boy's homosexuality);
** "Thnks fr th Mmrs," in which 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 ''Film/WhoFramedRogerRabbit''.
* Nu Shooz' "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUXo-UlQG-A I Can't Wait]]", basically the result of [[http://goldenageofmusicvideo.com/nu-shooz-and-director-jim-blashfield-talk-about-i-cant-wait/ the director deciding to make it up as he went along]] and incorporating whatever visually interesting props and common day objects he found in or around the studio that day. As the artists themselves put it: "this video still has people wondering why a dog is in sunglasses."
* RATATAT with their song, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUthOxfpMo Shempi.]] It's a nose-dive into the UncannyValley after having suffered serious head-trauma.
* Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" is a fun song that's great to dance to. It also has a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8md51JnCNFQ 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''. [[HellIsThatNoise The creepy chuckle]] at the end makes it worse.
* Music/DavidBowie: A TropeCodifier. If the Bowie video you're watching is post-1979 and not a ConceptVideo, there's a good chance it's this. Examples include "Fashion", "Loving the Alien", "Miracle Goodnight", "Hallo Spaceboy", and "Little Wonder".
** "Ashes To Ashes", made in 1980, was probably his first to go surreal, though it straddles this trope ''and'' ConceptVideo if one interprets it as the hallucinations of Major Tom (the song is a sequel to "Space Oddity" that suggests that he is actually a drug addict trying to sober up). Bowie's dressed as a clown walking along a beach, then there's four others in strange costumes walking in front of a bulldozer, then Bowie's in a padded cell, then he's hanging from a wall in a cave somewhere with tubes sticking out of him...
** "★" is the best example in terms of this trope. The whole video feels incredibly hallucinogenic and features a ton of bizarre moments in the video.
* The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY8OUjxzBhs 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 Music/TheBeatles. Climbing a tree, pouring paint on a piano...
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psuRGfAaju4 Fireflies]] by Music/OwlCity.
* Ever feel like Japanese media was becoming too normal for you? Music/KyaryPamyuPamyu's "[[http://youtu.be/yzC4hFK5P3g PONPONPON]]" is here to [[WidgetSeries fix that.]]
** And if that wasn't enough, we also have [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGpPh_-ceUY Tsukema Tsukeru]] from the same artist.
* The strange colors and designs that appear in Windows Media Player.
* A lot of Music/TheWhiteStripes' videos, particularly in their indie period.
* Full, vocalist of Music/GuniwTools 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 "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLw5b70OJH8 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.

* Islandrocks' [[http://www.coupdegracestudios.com/new.php?d=30 "Back to the 80's"]].

* Music/TearsForFears had quite a few of these, with [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_DfPNU-oM4 "Sowing the Seeds of Love"]] and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2s4wbFAhFw "Head over Heels"]] perhaps the most notable.

* Clean Bandit made two music videos for "Solo", and the first one qualifies: member Grace Chatto gets revenge on an abusive boyfriend... by tainting his dinner with a concoction that turns him into a psychedelic rainbow golden retriever. There's also a couple of unexplained scenes of Grace's face evaporating.

* Music/{{Melvins}}' "Bar X The Rocking M" involves imagery associated with [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead the Day Of The Dead]] mixed in with actors dressed as nuns, angels, devils, skeletons, and pigs. Meanwhile, "The Talking Horse" has a {{mindscrew}} of a plot that seems to spoof conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and [[TheReptilians reptiloids]], then throws in lip-syncing scenery for good measure. Even when they do relatively straightforward {{Performance Video}}s there always seem to be a few cuts to surrealist imagery.

[[/folder]]

* Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is set at a British boys' school and features fencers, football players, ninjas, gymnasts in silver diapers, men in black leather jackets and an angel.

* During TheNineties, Indian musician [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daler_Mehndi Daler Mehndi]] faced accusations that his songs were only successful because of the {{fanservice}}-laden music videos. He fired back with the legendarily bizarre [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTIIMJ9tUc8 video]] for "Tunak Tunak Tun", eschewing the usual sexy female dancers in favour of several {{Palette Swap}}ped DifferentlyDressedDuplicates of himself doing a bizarre dance while {{Chroma Key}}ed onto various ConspicuousCG backgrounds. Judging by the video's viral popularity on Website/{{YouTube}}, he seems to have proven the critics wrong.

* ''Music/FleetFoxes'' has "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yAxIdkF2Qo&nohtml5=False The Shrine/An Argument]]". It's a BreakupSong. The music video features an antelope, the severed heads of other animals on pikes, tribal dancers around a fire, and a two-headed dragon having, well, an argument with itself.

** Music/{{Incubus}}, "Megalomaniac". It alternates between collage-like images of the band playing in a [=WW2=] 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.

* Herbie Hancock's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHhD4PD75zY "Rockit"]] is set against a backdrop of a room full of unusual puppeteered mannequins, with the film often rapidly reversing in time with the song's record-scratch sounds.

* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qO9F8mtL5o "No New Kinda Story"]] by Music/Starflyer59. If you aren't familiar with ''Film/TheSeventhSeal'', 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[[note]]they're a ShoutOut to Echo and the Bunnymen's video "Bring on the Dancing Horses"[[/note]] and the random shots of a hammer smashing things.
* Music/StoneTemplePilots, "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, like Pinocchio's, [[MakesSenseInContext due to his lying nature]].
* Every Music/TalkingHeads 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 [[TheInvisibleBand rest of the band missing]].

* Music/PearlJam's "Do The Evolution" was an AnimatedMusicVideo (directed by none other than [[Comicbook/{{Spawn}} Todd Macfarlane]]) that devolved quickly into apocalyptic imagery and people with skull faces.

* Music/TheCure. Any music video, and I really mean any video. Pick one. Highlights include the second version of Close To Me, in which the bandmates go under the sea and essentially do battle with a dazzling variety of technicolour marine life, and The 13th, involving guys in wedding dresses having a fight with Robert Smith looking on. The latter gets even more surreal when you take into account the fact that the song is basically a typical sex-driven Cure song. {{Squick}} central.

* At some point ''Music/{{Knorkator}}'' started making music videos, which usually tend to be even weirder than the lyrics themselves. The most surreal would probably be ''[[http://www.myspace.com/video/knorkator/weg-nach-unten/40685507 Weg nach unten]]'' which seems to be about a person escaping from the world by digging a tunnel deep into the earth, away from everything. While digging a tunnel does appear in one part of the video, it has no other connections to the lyrics, and is really, really weird. [[note]]Yes, that ending show accidentally digging all the way to Australia.[[/note]] It also happens to be the [[TrueArtIsIncomprehensible most artistic of their videos.]]