Surreal Music Video

Surprisingly, things only get weirder from here.

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 inter cut with or somehow involve the band performing, but sometimes they go all-out and dispense with the band shots as well.

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Examples:

A to I

• Just about anything from The '80s. Animotion's "Obssession" is a good example.
  • So is Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer."
  • Special mention goes to his video for Shock the Monkey.
  • 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?
  • Billy Joel 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.
• Ace of Base's "Beautiful Life". Justified in that the entire thing is a dream sequence.
• 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.
• Ayla's "Ayla Part 2" consists of a mysterious blonde woman in an Ethereal White Dress gyrating, holding a strange shiny object, and teleporting to various locales around the world.
• Afrojack's "Ray Bomb" is about a woman dancing outside of a club with headphones until she, and her own heart get surrounded by animated alien tree roots.
• 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.
• 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, as well as having shoutouts to The Matrix.
• Many Alice in Chains videos, including "We Die Young", "Angry Chair", "I Stay Away", "Grind," "Lesson Learned," and "The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here."
• Alpine offers a sexy example with "Hands" which has a house full of girls doing a bunch of strange things, culminating in all of them making out with their hands.
• Animal Collective, "Water Curses." I don't know, you figure it out.
  • Pretty much all the group's videos are surreal/abstract in some way. It matches their sound perfectly.
• Armin van Buuren's Blue Fear is a Mind Screw overall, but the main Surreal Horror attraction begins when a giant floating mummy head emerges from a Hellraiser-esque box and chases an Asian-looking girl around a hedge maze.
• Arctic Monkeys' "Do I Wanna Know?" video starts off with a minimalist shot of a sound wave, synchronized in time with Alex Turner's vocals, and then gets more and more incomprehensible by each chorus, featuring chicks placing down tires, tons of Fanservicey women, a man driving on a giant eagle, and more weirdness.
• ASTR's Operate. A haunting montage of surreal clips accompanying an already weird R&B song is one way to describe it.
• 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 On a Soundstage All Along and the psychedelic figure is a dancer in a chroma key zentai suit.
• 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 Avalanches' "Frontier Psychiatrist". Appropriate, given that it's a surreal song.
• Avi Buffalo's "What's It In For?" The music video has the band is preforming in a field as trippy looking plants start to grow and eventually cover the band when they lay down in them.
• Barenaked Ladies, "One Week." Straightforward performance video in front of a royal court, until the band gets kicked out and it turns into a Dukes of Hazzard-like car chase (with the General Lee car, no less!) ending with an Evel Knievel-style motorcyclist.
• 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.
• Bastille: "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 Mind Screw involving female roller skaters, burning buildings, giant living teddy bears, game shows, bank robberies, and Dan's disembodied head lying on the ground by some sports equipment. All this set to the eponymous song: 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.
• The real Ur Example is "Strawberry Fields Forever" by The Beatles. Climbing a tree, pouring paint on a piano...
• 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 incomprehensible, it's that it's hard to understand what's going on, as the video various switches to random scenes and situtations.
  • "Gameboy/Homeboy (Que Onda Guero 8-Bit Remix)." Given that it was made by the same people that brought us The Problem Solverz, it's not really that surprising.
• Bestial Mouths' cover of The Human League's "Being Boiled."
• The Birthday Massacre:
  • The video for 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 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.
• Most of Björk's numerous videos exhibit fascinating surrealism. The aforementioned Gondry is responsible for seven of them.
• The whole music video for Blockhead's "The Music Scene" is a surreal animation.
• Bloc Party's "Ratchet", where they managed to take a montage of their past videos and turn it into this.
• The Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch" has an understandable starting point: "you and me baby ain't nothing but mammals" = the band dressed as monkeys. But all the monkey business in Paris doesn't make any sense.
• Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is set at a boys' school and features fencers, football players, ninjas, gymnasts in silver diapers, men in black leather jackets and an angel.
• The Break Up's My Machine intercuts between standard performance footage, the two lead band members, who are wearing cellophane wrap outfits and Uncanny Valley Makeup, hooked up to a tangle of wires and coming to life Frankenstein-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 zooming along the wires and tubes, concluding with the singers disconnecting the machine (hence the lyrics).
• Hold It Against Me by Britney Spears is called this.
• Cabin Crew's "Star to Fall" consists mainly of scantily clad flight stewardesses performing a Busby Berkeley Number.
• Carnival of Rust
• 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.
• Charlotte Gainsbourg's "Heaven Can Wait" is full of bizarre shots. Among other weirdness, you get to see a skateboard standing on top of eight hamburgers, a man trying to outrun a spinning axe (no, he doesn't try to just jump out of the way), a dinosaur in a wig (in a bathtub), a man bathing in milk and cereal, a giant rat getting held up at knife point, a man in a SpongeBob costume getting tackled by the police, an astronaut with pancakes for a head, and man with half a beard.
• The video for Childish Gambino's "3005" just has him singing the lyrics while on a Ferris wheel next to a living teddy bear that gets more and more mutilated as the video goes on. Even the official lyric video (which is usually just the lyrics printed over an album cover or an image related to the song) is presented as Gambino in one of those online "chats" with "sexy girls."
  • "Sweatpants": Bino enters an endless recursion of time, with more people being replaced by himself each time he enters the diner. Yeah, I don't get it either.
  • The video for "Telegraph Ave. (Oakland by Lloyd)" mostly fits with the themes of the song, following Gambino on vacation with Jhené Aiko, until the last minute, where Gambino is revealed to be an alien.
• 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 provocatively. 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 Björk. The video is pretty simple, and features two robots kissing. The robots both have Bjork's face.
  • 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 an asylum by swapping her dog's brain into one 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 "Gwarek 2" 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 in time to "Afx 237 v.7" by Aphex Twin.
  • 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.
    • Or she's possibly dancing with a facehugger on her face. It's difficult to tell. But in any case, she's clearly very, very unhappy about it.
• "When the Night Falls" by Chromeo has Solange Knowles and every other woman the band encounters getting instantly preggo via The Power of Rock, followed by Dave getting the MPreg treatment just before he awakens from the nightmare.
• CHVRCHES's "Gun" depicts the band performing the song normally while being subjected to various psychedelic effects.
• Clairity's "DNA" and "Velcro".
• Clean Bandit made two music videos for "Solo", and the first one qualifies: With the help of the rest of the group, 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. Guest vocalist Demi Lovato appears to be singing in Grace's living room as this all happens, but doesn't really interact with her or anyone else. 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 in the psychedelic dog potion.
• "Keep A Lid On Things" by Crash Test Dummies involves a miniature Brad Roberts piloting a Mobile-Suit Human version of himself, which mimes the lyrics and lumbers down the street in a very creepy sort of way. Eventually, his mobile suit human gets low on power and he has to fly down to the ground with a jet-pack in order to retrieve some batteries... At which point we see powered-down versions of the rest of the band lying on the street: Apparently he was remotely controlling everyone else too.
• 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.
• Crowded House has Private Universe and Four Seasons in One Day.
• The Cure. 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.
• 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.
• David Bowie: A Trope Codifier. If the 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."
  • "Ashes To Ashes", made in 1980, was probably his first to go surreal, though it straddles this trope and Concept Video 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 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.
• 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.")
• David Guetta & Sia's "She Wolf (Falling to Pieces)."
• The video for David Lynch's "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 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 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.
• 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.
• Death from Above 1979 has "Caught Up," which features the duo performing in a mysterious room before being shocked by lightning and transformed into geometrical figures.
• Andrea Giacobb did a genuinely unsettling video for Death in Vegas' "Dirt."
• The majority of demoscene productions are this set to electronic dance music.
• Dir en grey'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 Mind Screw-y videos of theirs are "AGITATED SCREAMS OF MAGGOTS" and "DIFFERENT SENSE".
• 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.
• "(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.
• Dog Police had two, the eponymous song (actual dog people!) and "1-800."
• Just about all of DragonForce's videos are this to some degree. Example.
• Another band that has hellaciously trippy sound and videos is DyE. Probably the best example of their work is the aptly named "Fantasy" (NSFW). What the video has to do with the lyrics is anyone's guess, but this teenage getaway turned The Thing-style Body Horror has to be seen to be believed.
• Ed Tullett's very, very unique video for "Oxblood". An artistic expression of loss and sadness, a Postmodernism take on drug use, an advocacy for gay porn... You're guess on its symbolism is as good as mine.
• Ego Likeness's "Treacherous Thing" video has Donna Lynch going completely nuts, randomly cuts to close ups of her face while she is coughing up blood and red stones with red ''tears'' down her face, while Steven Archer does nothing but sit very still with a blank face.
• Electric Six are known for this. The only thing weirder than whatever "Gay Bar" [NSFW] is is... whatever "Formula 409" is.
• Enya has quite a few dreamy, if weird, music videos, such as Anywhere Is, Orinoco Flow and Only If.
• Erasure - 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. Likewise, "Chains of Love" has Andy and Vince wire levitating around a room full of hanging chains and alternating between normal and camp/drag outfits, while the love interest attempts to get unchained.
• E-Type's "Here I Go Again".
• Extrawelt's Raum in Raum. A Deliberately Monochrome 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 Bound and Gagged.
  • Even more trippy: Was Übrig Bleibt.
• 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 (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 Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
• This Stop Motion video for Finn Riggins' "Wake (Keep This Town Alive").
• Faith No More has some pretty weird videos, especially "Epic."
• 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...
• Fleet Foxes has "The Shrine/An Argument." It's a Break-Up Song. 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.
• 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.
• ¡Forward, Russia!'s "Nineteen" is a slow motion film of kids throwing waterbombs full of purple paint at each other.
• Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" is like a whistlestop tour of early 20th Century Art, in the style of Terry Gilliam.
• 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 World War II setting, Adolf Hitler with airplane wings and ballerina shoes, a George W. 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 (Karen Elson, who would later become Jack White's wife - they met at this video shoot) with incredibly long heels, a horse, a creepy Jack White, and Meg White eating dishes (literally).
• The Future Sound of London's "We Have Explosive." I do not want to explain it.
• "Mt. Moriah" by Gadarene Swine has 3D dinosaurs walking, and later fighting, on blue and green screens. The song is an (according to the Bandcamp tags) "Alternative Experimental Folk Grunge Noise" song about walking down a lonely road.
• "Push It" by Garbage. Assassins dressed as nuns and a guy with a lightbulb for a head are just two examples.
• Gouryella's "Walhalla" video has a freak-out sequence after the Black Viking bumps his head into the camera. Dancing skeletons and spinning flowers against a psychedelic hypno-wheel background, etc.
• Grimes' music video for "Vanessa." It features her and a bunch of other girls dancing, hanging out, smearing makeup all over their faces, and kaleidoscope effects.
• Grizzly Bear's Knife and Two Weeks.
• Full, vocalist of Guniw Tools directed one for every single song in their discography.
• Herbie Hancock's "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.
• His Name Is Alive collaborated with famously eccentric stop motion animators the Brothers Quay to create two music videos for their songs "Are We Still Married" and "Can't Go Wrong Without You" as part of the brothers' Stille Nacht series of short films. The Quays, already well known for their Signature Style of gothic, stop motion Surreal Horror, obliged with gusto, turning in a nightmarish pair of videos featuring blood, dolls, anthropomorphic rabbits, implications of sexual trauma, and a skull-faced figure who moves like something from Jacob's Ladder.
• Hobo Johnson's video for "Typical Story" is about a wild party with lots of unsettling things going on: people's faces being distorted by puffs of air, creepy bikini babes with the heads of orcs circling around, and shots at the end of people whose faces obviously don't match their bodies (Hobo's face is superimposed on a twitching, shirtless bodybuilder's torso).
• Hot Chip's video for "I Feel Better". Words alone can't express how weird it gets.
• This is indeed part of iamamiwhoami's schtick as an artistic unit.
• 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.
• Imagine Dragons has a few examples:
  • "I Bet My Life" has a young man, portrayed by Dane Dehaan, get sucked into a dam during a fistfight. He goes through different environments of sea, air, and land, which become revealed as All Just a Dream as the other fighter pulls him out of the river. Imagine Dragons themselves only appear a few seconds during the opening.
  • "Shots" places Imagine Dragons in environments inspired by the works of surrealist painter Tim Cantor, who produced covers for the band's second album and its singles.
• Most of Information Society's videography fits the bill:
  • Their '80s videos such as "Walking Away" and "What's On Your Mind" were especially trippy.
  • Their 2016 take on "Heffalumps and Woozles" (featuring Ayria) cranks the trippiness of the film's Disney Acid Sequence up tenfold.
• In Inna's Wow video, she gets knocked unconscious at a beach party and dreams of being a stripperific Snow White erotically dancing with the Seven Dwarfs, then after "falling dead" from consuming the poisoned apple, she becomes a similarly oversexualized Dorothy Gale on the Yellow Brick Road. Cut to her as sexy Alice in Wonderland performing some more erotic movements in a tiny house and at the Mad Hatter's tea party, where the characters from the previous stories join in for the final dance.
• Music/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 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.

J to R

• 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).
• Joywave's music videos are almost invariably a certain degree of surreal, ranging from an MP3 player becoming a member of the band ("Destruction"), hunters searching for nudists to shoot clothes back on them ("Tongues") to a man's slow descent into drug addiction disguised as a medicine ad ("Half Your Age") and the band glitching through reality while skateboarding ("Somebody New").
• 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.
• Kerli's Walking on Air and Zero Gravity; be warned, potential Nightmare Fuel (and you thought Lady Gaga was freaky).
• In Kid Cudi'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.
• "Heartbeats by The Knife 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 "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 Knorkator started making music videos, which usually tend to be even weirder than the lyrics themselves. The most surreal would probably be 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. It also happens to be the most artistic of their videos.
• Ever feel like Japanese media was becoming too normal for you? Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's "PONPONPON" is here to fix that.
  • And if that wasn't enough, we also have Tsukema Tsukeru from the same artist.
  • Better yet, E.T..
• Starting with "Paparazzi," Lady Gaga has been particularly renowned for this.
• 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.
• 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, 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 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.
• "Remedy" by Little Boots starts as a Performance Video, then gets all kaleidoscopic.
• Lower Dens' video for “Candy” shows members of the band at a woodland retreat with some drag queens and a teen boy with a yarmulke. The activities at the camp are only a little weird, but at the end the whole picture explodes into strange gaudy logos.
• Madonna:
  • "Bedtime Story" which is a surrealism video, a live-action version of surrealistic paintings, it's a dream-esque scene video.
  • "Cherish," which she appears with mermaids on a beach.
  • "Express Yourself," which is influenced by German expressionist director Fritz Lang.
  • "Like a Prayer," where she kisses a saint, is about racism in a surreal / artistic form. It was controversial enough back then to cost her her Pepsi endorsement deal.
  • "Nothing Really Matters," influenced by traditional Japanese fashion.
  • "The Power of Goodbye," which shows a post apocalyptic world.
  • "Vogue," which shows an art deco collection and a Hollywood's Golden Era-esque photography; the dance is influenced by the underground dance of the same name.
• "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.
• Marilyn Manson's 'Sweet Dreams'. It can't really be described... just watch it.
• 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.
• Matchbox Twenty, "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.
• 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.
• "Bleed◊" by Meshuggah: A man is turned into a mindless slave creature by an albino god. Interspersed with heavy doses of Nightmare Fuel imagery and clockwork gears.
• Metallica's video for "Until It Sleeps" is full of imagery taken from the surreal paintings of 16th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.
• 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. Meanwhile, "The Talking Horse" 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 seem to be a few cuts to surrealist imagery.
• 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.
  • The 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.
• Several videos directed by Mark Romanek qualify, but especially his work with Trent Reznor.
• 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.
• Mike Mareen's "Love Spy"; whatever story is being told is anybody's guess. Mike performs a stage magic illusion of being turned into a dog, runs through a tire obstacle course, plays hide-and-seek in a department store, starts a fight at a casino, walks in on a martial arts class, etc., while a gay couple play keyboards in a hot tub, in a hayloft, on a public stairway landing, and at an amusement park.
• Miley Cyrus song "Start All Over" music video is just one long shot with random junk all over the place.
  • Her video for "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.
  • " Lighter" from Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz.
• The Mind's Eye is a series of four animated films that consist entirely of Surreal Music Videos. They are also compilations of various CGI clips submitted to them, and thus fall under No Plot? No Problem! The coherentness of each song's video varies.
• Missing Persons' "Surrender Your Heart" looks like a montage of animated MS Paint images on an acid trip.
• MGMT's "Time To Pretend", from Oracular Spectacular.
  • Hell, ANYTHING by MGMT. 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, 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.
  • And then there's "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...
• Moby's "Shot in the Back of the Head", produced by David Lynch.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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). And an effeminate male in a punching bag signing the lyrics.
  • 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.
• The New Pornographers' "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.
• 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 Word Salad Lyrics that Kershaw himself admitted were meant to be a placeholder while he thought the lyrics through but ended up the real lyrics when he couldn't make any coherent ones work with the melody. 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 Batman fame. The same Riddler shows up a number of times, along with figures from Alice in Wonderland. Does not make the video more understandable, though.
• The video for Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box" with creepy versions of the Teletubbies.
• Noah:
  • Peterpan's "Diatas Normal" music video is composed of the band performing the song, except the background, their outfits (which gets bizarre at times) and their instrument change every beat. It reflects the I-don't-understand-my-own-mind theme of the song.
  • Noah's "Mendekati Lugu" video shows a girl dancing to the song and touching people around a stadium which makes them dance too, all while weird visual effects happen. At the end, the girl suddenly nearly drowns (while still struggling to dance) in the swimming pool, but she (now the size of human hand) is picked up by Ariel.
• Nogu Svelo's Haru Mamburu. Combined with gibberishy, yet oddly catchy lyrics.
• Nu Shooz' "I Can't Wait", basically the result of 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."
• 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.
• 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. (Except for the ones before "A Million Ways", which are itself still this trope)
• OneRepublic got some among their more down-to-earth videos:
  • "Stop And Stare" has lead singer Ryan Tedder listening to a preacher in front of a grave. He generates a "clone" of himself, who walks toward a motel, where other Ryan is waiting at the reception. Somewhere near, he is performing the song with the band, while other people (including Ryan and the other members) watch from the outside. As one of Ryans crosses the street, he is almost ran over by another Ryan Tedder, driving a car with a pregnant woman in the backseat.
  • "Love Runs Out" happens in some kind of desert with colorful sunset/sunrise skies. In this desert there is an old woman playing the piano, kids clapping and girls dancing with tambourines, all donning weird clothes (natives, maybe?). Shady creatures ride dancing horses, a man in a shiny outfit does some stunts, youngsters play with a ball, "ninjas" kick stacks of books, women in craters wave with the song, and then there is a plastic sea. Also, Brent Kutzle is golden and Zach Filkins blows things up.
• Fireflies by Owl City.
• The original video for Ozzy Osbourne's "Mama, I'm Coming Home", which had Ozzy and his band miming over a Conveyor Belt Video-style collage. Some of the imagery at least obliquely had to do with the general idea of "coming home" - airplanes, the Statue Of Liberty, and the New York City skyline for example. More of it was arbitrary and surreal, like Ozzy carrying a pig or miming the lyrics towards a raven perched on his shoulder, visual Shout Outs to René Magritte, and gratuitous use of fire. A Performance Video for the same song was also made, specifically because Ozzy didn't think this approach suited the material.
• 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 making 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. 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 fifties-theme video where everyone has fish tank heads and, more recently, the video for 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 chopped a girl's head off."
• Pakito has two videos
  • "Living on Video" is about mirrored videos of dancing TVs with legs, and lips with stereos that engulf the scenery.
  • "Are U Ready" is about a Pakito concert that gets attacked by animations of stars and pictures.
• Paramore's "Still Into You" includes scenes where Hayley Williams sings in a bedroom full of birthday cakes with lit candles and the band travels by rowboat across an indoor "sea" of blue balloons. It also includes relatively mundane things like the band riding bikes indoors or playing with sparklers as fireworks go off. Rather than tell the straightforward love story suggested by the lyrics, the director wanted to show what being in love feels like.
  • "Running Out Of Time" starts out with Hayley singing in a rehearsal space, then things start getting weird when a guitar and a stack of drums come to life and start menacing her, and she climbs into a guitar case that transports her into a surreal landscape. Ultimately it turns out to just be Hayley's daydream.
• Many Pavement videos are low-bud and nonsensical. For example, the video for "Gold Soundz" doesn't feature any performance or seem to have much of a story; it's little more than the band messing around in Santa costumes. Even "Cut Your Hair," which has a loose story (the band going to a barber shop) is full of surreal imagery, such as one of the members sneezing out a kitten, another getting his haircut in a gorilla suit, etc.
• Pearl Jam's "Do The Evolution" was an Animated Music Video (directed by none other than Todd Mc Farlane) that devolved quickly into apocalyptic imagery and people with skull faces.
• The Pet Shop Boys' Go West.
• P!nk's video for "All I Know So Far" has her travelling through a nightmarish landscape, filled with symbolic representations of the tribulations described in the song (and in her life), first on her own, then with her husband Carey Hart (who she keeps killing) and finally with Hart and their kids, before she and her daughter Willow are skeletonised by a nuclear explosion. "Till the world blows up", indeed.
• Preschool Popstars music videos sometimes have trippy visuals, especially in the choruses:
  • "Wash Your Hands" has the girls standing on giant bars of soap and kicking Monstrous Germs. The sky is also orange in some scenes.
  • "I Didn't Mean to Burp" has the background changing colour and shows scenes of the Asian girl shrinking and wandering through a world of food.
  • "Juice Box" also has multicoloured backgrounds, along with many scenes of the girls swimming in juice.
  • "Bounce" also has the background changing colour, along with the beginning showing jello and clouds being bounced on.
• Caroline Polachek has "Door," featuring multiple sets of concentric portals, an alternate universe where the horizon line bends over on itself, a 3D animated abstract marble track, and, as a final course, Caroline's disembodied eyes and mouth singing the song's outro.
  • "Welcome To My Island" includes scenes of her repelling giant animated sperm, and vomiting out coffee in front of an erupting volcano.
• Most (if not all) of Project Pitchfork's videos are this, as well as being Nightmare Fuel. Such as Timekiller, Renascence, and Lament
• 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.
• RATATAT with their song, Shempi.
• Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Can't Stop", from By the Way.
• 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.
• The Residents provide the Ur-Example, having produced their own, completely bizarre promotional clips since as early as 1974.
• The music video of Rezz's track Premonition is pretty much this.
• Royal Blood has "Out of the Black," which consists of live-action and (rather gory) animated sequences of alien mascots battling the police and a gas-station attendant.

S to Z

• The music video for Sakanaction's "Rookie", where the singer Ichirō Yamaguchi repeatedly has a nightmare of falling (which might or might not also be a Dream Within a Dream), wakes up suddenly, walks around the city confused passing always in the same exact spot and keeps finding a fallen woman lying dead on the pavement.
• 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.
• 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.
  • His video for his earlier single "Home", which features Sean walking bent backwards, running "underwater" with goldfishes swimming around... Just watch it.
• Short Stack, Ladies and Gentlemen. Involves a hospital, the band, some sexy nurses, some fucked-up x-ray scenes, and secret doorways.
• "Spasmolytic" by Skinny Puppy.
• "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^note they're a Shout-Out to Echo & the Bunnymen's video "Bring on the Dancing Horses" and the random shots of a hammer smashing things.
• A few of Sleigh Bells' music videos. The "Rill Rill" video has a picture day session at a school from hell, shrine filled lockers, a bleeding telephone…
  • Also the "Locust Laced" video, which stars Alexis as a Dolly Parton-esque performer who slowly starts losing it on stage and keeps repeatedly running into the wall behind her before she vanishes in a cloud of smoke. There's also several close-up of a bored basset hound and Derek drinking until he passes out.
• The Smashing Pumpkins' Georges Méliès-influenced clip for "Tonight, Tonight" features a couple (Tom Kenny 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.
• 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 "Peacebone", "Summertime Clothes" and "Brother Sport."
• Sparklehorse's "Someday I Will Treat You Good": There seems to be a loose plot about a woman having a troubled relationship with a puppet of main member Mark Linkous - it's broken up by shots of vintage toys and knick-knacks (including the Monster Clown head sculpture used for the front cover of Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot) and things like Mark Linkous wearing chicken or snowman masks, or a Dalmatian running around with costume wings on its back.
• 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, like Pinocchio's, due to his lying nature.
  • Set in a spooky-looking hillside, the "Sour Girl" video involves extras in creepy bunny costumes with lolling tongues, gratuitous closeups of insects, and a shirtless Scott Weiland dancing erotically with two contrasting versions of Sarah Michelle Gellar (one in dark, gothic-style makeup with straight, black hair, the other in lighter makeup and curly blonde hair).
• Suede's "Stay Together", which features the lead singer gagged at the end, among other things that have nothing to do with the song whatsoever. The band has denounced it as nothing more than "empty symbolism."
• 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.
• The music video for Suzanne Vega's "Tired of Sleeping" is rather absurd, with no discernible meaning.
• 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.
  • For that matter, the last 30 seconds or so of "Burning Down the House". Byrne's head, complete with slack jaw and thousand-yard stare, projected on to a road from a moving car. What.
  • Also worth mentioning is spinoff band The Heads' "Damage I've Done". The imagery does connect to the lyrics in an odd sort of way: the refrain is "How can I undo the damage I have done?", and much of the video revolves around footage of people doing "damaging" things (ranging from dropping a framed photograph to spitting in a cop's face) played in reverse.
• 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 overlaid on the animal footage.
• Tears for Fears had quite a few of these, with "Sowing the Seeds of Love" and "Head over Heels" perhaps the most notable.
• 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.
  • 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.
• TOKiMONSTA's video for "The Force" (feat. Kool Keith). Which can only be described as the experience of a gangsta Jedi Knight on ecstasy, going on a seizure.
• Too Much Joy's "Making Fun Of Bums", which among other things features the band performing wearing brightly colored jumpsuits, a painter walking into a shot for no clear reason, and lengthy Talky Bookends of everyone just standing around silently on a pier dressed as fishermen. The band disliked the results, 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").
• 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 a cupboard that is closed by the black figure. Their video "Ænema" 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.
• "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.
• The video for Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" is heavily inspired by The Mad Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland with elements such as Alice's body turning into a cake thrown in to make it ever weirder.
• 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.
• 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.
• Vremya i Steklo has several of these, most notably "Imya 505" ("Name 505") and "Troll".
• Belong by Washed Out. Xanadu aerobics workout disco dance contest in space sums it up.
• 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.
• 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.
• A lot of The White Stripes' videos, particularly in their indie period.
• The strange colors and designs that appear in Windows Media Player.
• Xiu Xiu's video for "Pumpkin Attack On Mommy and Daddy." Bubbles, pigs, chains, celery, garlic, Korean folk legends... what else would you expect from a video for a song with that title?
• 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. The song is about the 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.
• "Oh Yeah" by Yello.
• Each of the music videos for Yellow Magic Orchestra's debut album and Solid State Survivor indulge in this. "Tong Poo" video overlays trippy visual effects upon footage of early arcade games and the band's own performance, while "Computer Game"/"Firecracker", "Technopolis", and "Rydeen" feature various psychedelic sequences animated using various videotape effects (with the latter two, like "Tong Poo", also incorporating performance footage of the band).
• 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.

To be alphabetized

• Islandrocks' "Back to the 80's".
• Koyaanisqatsi: The "qatsi" trilogy is feature-length films, but otherwise they definitely qualify— nothing but abstract ambiguous shots of nature and people at work, shot with pioneering use of undercrank and other distorting effects, set to the trippy minimalist music of Philip Glass.
• All of Death Grips's music videos, really. A lot of them exploit Stylistic Suck to almost Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff levels. Take the videos for "Guillotine", "The Fever", and "Takyon", for example.
• ABC's "The Look of Love" has the band members dressed in Edwardian outfits at a period carnival with a cartoon backdrop, reminiscent of the chalk drawing sequence in Mary Poppins.
• "The Dragon Flies" by David Vendetta & Sylvia Tosun (Vensun) features a pair of Chinese dragons flying through space in a double helix pattern, a singer with Glowing Eyes of Doom and Black Swan-esque makeup, and various other psychedelic imagery, reminiscent of the game Child of Eden.
• During The '90s, Indian musician Daler Mehndi faced accusations that his songs were only successful because of the fanservice-laden music videos. He fired back with the legendarily bizarre video for "Tunak Tunak Tun", eschewing the usual Three Minutes of Writhing in favour of several Palette Swapped Differently Dressed Duplicates of himself doing a strange dance while Chroma Keyed onto various CG backgrounds. Judging by the video's viral popularity on YouTube, he seems to have proven the critics wrong.
• Nine Inch Nails has "Came Back Haunted" (directed by David Lynch for extra surrealness) and "The Perfect Drug."
• The English video for One-Hit Wonder Trio's "Da Da Da" is just a loop of a line of platform divers splashing into a giant bowl of Spaghetti-Os, accompanied by a motorcycle jumping off a ramp, a BMW(?) driving out of a tunnel, and a pair of dancers with drums on their heads. The German Alternate Music Video, on the other hand, is a more straightforward Performance Video.
• Queen's video for "I'm Going Slightly Mad" straddles the line between Surreal Humor and Surreal Horror.
• JR JR's "Gone" features a chorus of creepy dancing disembodied legs.
• Future Perfect's ""Paradise". The background animation looks like something out of Winamp's Visualization Studio.
• Kamil Jasmin's Na Tu Svatbu sounds catchy, but its music video makes it fit this trope well. Helps that Amanita Design made it.
• This CGI animated video for "Pink Cadillac" by Jerry Lee Lewis and Bruce Springsteen.
• You'd think the music video for "I'm Gonna Always Love You" from The Muppets Take Manhattan would be simple. The Dream Sequence scene of Baby Piggy singing is already practically a music video, so just use that, right? Nope! Record new Muppet Babies scenes, and intermix with a very eighties pig band, Jim Henson in flipper slippers, a bunch of references to other music videos, the adult Kermit and Piggy, a ton of increasingly bizarre effects shots, and an actual frog and pig.
• In Moloko's "Sing it Back", a stroboscopically blurred and replicated Roisin Murphy sensually dances in a minidress made of mirrors.

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