Music videos have all the right ingredients to be viral: they’re short, meaning more budget per second, and they’re easy to stream online; and unlike movies, there is commercial incentive for their creators to disseminate them as much as possible – the success of pop giants like Michael Jackson and Madonna was largely due to their strategic use of music videos as a medium.

Despacito by Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee has been viewed on YouTube more than 6.5 billion times. And nine of the 10 most viewed videos of all time are music videos. Outside of the repetitive commercial pop and hip-hop which dominates the web, there are many music videos that utilise the versatile medium in unique, innovative ways. What follows in this article is not a list of groundbreaking classics, which influenced music videos as a genre, (that’s a list for another day), but rather our pick of some of the most creative modern videos which have been produced since.

Needing/ Getting

 OK GO are without a doubt the big daddies of music videos; it all started with four dudes geeky dancing on some treadmills and this list could easily have been filled with any of their numerous intricate off-the-wall masterpieces. Ten years ago, the four artists nerd-rocked YouTube with Here It Goes Again, a simple one-take video of four guys performing quirky choreographed dance moves on moving treadmills.

Since then, they have one-upped themselves with every single they’ve released. Their music video for Needing and Getting is made using the world’s first musical race-track.

In it, the band drives a car kitted out with mics, rods and all sorts of paraphernalia through a racetrack in the desert filled with pianos, barrels and anything else they could think of to produce the melody. Damian Kulash, the singer at the wheel, took stunt driving lessons and the whole production took four months and 155 takes to get it right. The resulting video is astounding, and the song is rather nice too. If this is your first time flying with OK GO, start out with Upside Down & Inside Out (filmed in zero-gravity), The One Moment (filmed in 4.2 seconds and slowed down), and Obsession (stop-frame animation using 567 printers).

Up & Up

 Animation has come a long way since MTV’s prophetic release of the music video for Video Killed The Radio Store in 1981, which spliced computer-generated imagery with live-action film. Coldplay’s music video Up & Up takes this to the next level, overlaying multiple clips, which interact in unusual ways to create surreal and fascinating scenes. The song itself might sound ordinary, but the video is captivating enough that it would be worth watching even if it were on mute.

Rock It For Me

 Caravan Palace is possibly the world’s most successful electro-swing group, rivaled only by Parov Stellar. Electro-swing is about weaving the old with the new – it combines vintage swing and jazz music with electronic beats. Caravan Palace has chosen a futuristic steam-punk aesthetic to match this sentiment. Their music video Rock it for me parodies an alien invasion of a futuristic Paris, but is animated using stylistic elements, which reference the silent films of the 1920s. The 3-minute epic is humorous and fun and timed perfectly with the French group’s trademark bouncy, feel-good music. Caravan Palace music videos are typically wacky animated stories. Check out Lone Digger and Miracle (Warning: both are rather explicit).

Her Morning Elegance

 Since the release of the music video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer in 1986, many directors have experimented with stop-frame animation, but few are so graceful as Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie. In 3,225 gorgeous still photographs, it animates the story of a woman’s dream in which objects in her life and mind interact with her. The song is mellow, melancholy, somewhat mystical and will leave you with a soft smile.

Light it Up

 The music video for Major Lazer’s song Light It Up was filmed by Method Studios, the same studio which has produced the special effects for blockbuster films like The Great Gatsby and The Hunger Games. The video comprises of faceless humanoid figures, which dance and contort and bounce about enthusiastically to the music all while melting shimmering, disassembling, reassembling and morphing into a multitude of forms. Light It Up makes use of cutting-edge procedural animation and motion capture, achieving a realistic appearance of both the characters’ movements and the textures of their bodies. The result is a tad creepy, but also highly entertaining. ML