It’s a sign of the times, but bizarre is the word that best describes 2024’s hoard of music videos. Some musicians used the weird and wonderful to make sense of their normal human feelings. Others looked to the absurd to make a political statement or to reflect on fame and the realities of an online world.

But it wasn’t all twisted. There were personal tales not often heard and big glossy productions, while others honed in on the craft and enlisted artists to visualise their sounds. Either way, directors found new ways to breathe life into a well-trodden landscape.

CR has handpicked ten of the best, including a fever dream nightclub, a kinetic ‘alive painting’, and a who’s who of internet hot girls.

Charli XCX, 360; Director: Aidan Zamiri

Charli XCX’s 360 music video is engineered for the extremely online. Setting the tone for Brat Summer, it assembled reigning hot internet girls (Julia Fox, Rachel Sennott, Amelia Gray Hamlin etc) around a table and tasked them with finding a new hot internet girl (to fulfil the prophecy). The criteria? Must have a certain je ne sais quoi; be known but, at the same time, unknowable. Then, the Brat-singer can “totally” do her song. 

Shot by Aidan Zamiri, a rising star within the alt-pop world, Charli XCX enlisted his vision again for Guess, where the singer and Billie Eilish guess the colour of their underwear in a mountain of lingerie. As the seasons changed from Brat Summer into Demure Autumn, the 360 music video picked up best UK pop video category and best music video of the year at the UK Music Video Awards. 

Mabel and Shygirl, Look at My Body (Pt. II); Director: David Wilson 

While you might think John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and R&B belong in different worlds, the art critic’s seminal work acted as one of the reference points director David Wilson received for Mabel and Shygirl’s music video Look at My Body (Part II), alongside body politics, the male gaze and the biblical tale of Adam and Eve. 

The result: a searing film that satirises Playboy covers, Marilyn Monroe’s windy subway grate and Eve’s Forbidden Fruit to fiercely reject the way the media consumes female bodies. 

Would it be a Wilson film without animation? The live-action scenes of Look at My Body descend into a trippy animation that illustrates how bodies are devoured, in the director’s trademark style, as seen in previous videos for Arctic Monkeys, David Guetta, Metronomy, Tame Impala and Arcade Fire.

Fontaines DC, Starbuster; Director: Aube Perrie

It makes a lot of sense that the surreal film for Fontaine’s explosive first single, Starbuster (from their fourth studio album Romance), was inspired by the lead singer’s panic attack at King’s Cross St Pancras station in London. 

It opens as Grian Chatten heads out, juxtaposing the dreary day with a lime green football referee outfit and an inhaler around his neck in lieu of a whistle. Normal enough so far. It goes square when he loses control of his keepy-uppy, and the ball rolls beyond his control under a garage door. Seemingly beaten up from the intrusion, Chatten morphs into twisted characters between gasps on his inhaler lifeline, but the garishly green tracksuit continues as a thread. 

Starbuster is perhaps Aube Perrie’s most bizarre film yet, contending for the title with his other playfully freakish films for former Little Mix member Jade’s Angel of My Dreams and RM’s Lost!. Chatten actually appears in Jade’s music video, and vice versa. Perrie closes the year in his directorial prime, scooping director of the year for a second year at the UK Music Video Awards.

Jamie xx, Treat Each Other Right; Director: Rosie Marks 

The Gordon Ramsay lookalike in Jamie xx’s music video is so accurate that even the chef’s mother would struggle to tell them apart. Why he’s behind a bar in a neon-lit swingers club spraying Elnett hairspray isn’t clear, but that’s beside the point; when you delve into Treat Each Other Right, you must leave any sense of rationality at the door. 

Filmed like the viewer has swallowed a concoction of trippy pills, the video unravels like a fever dream where anyone you could imagine has been invited to a party inside a dingy club where anything goes. Alongside Ramsay, Nigella Lawson cooks up a sad-looking sandwich; a kid who’s the spitting image of the Russian Dancing Gypsy Kid raves away; and a wide-eyed Dot Cotton appears from the ground. 

“We both wanted it to feel not necessarily like a club that he would be playing in,” explains Marks to CR. “I just was interested in showing a different side of club culture, one that is the more realistic club culture for a large majority of people.” There is meaning in the mayhem. Marks has devised a very human message about the emotional ebbs and flows of relationships.

 Sade, Young Lion; Director: Sophie Muller

Sade returned with her first song since 2018. It is a sweet tribute to her son Izaak, a trans man, that involved a touching apology for not understanding better what he was going through with the painfully pensive words: “I should’ve known.”  

Since Sade is notoriously private about her personal life, who better to direct the personal ode than old friend Sophie Muller? They have been friends since they met in the early 80s at Central Saint Martins in London, where they would hang out in the library writing abstract poems. 

The deeply personal film stitches together old home videos of Izaak growing up and footage of them driving together in the modern day, offering a rare glimpse into their life together.

Childish Gambino, Little Foot Big Foot; Director: Hiro Murai 

It’s hard to put into words the impact of Childish Gambino’s (aka Donald Glover) satirical masterpiece This is America, which educated 938 million viewers (and counting) on the history of American racism and gun violence. Glover and his long-time collaborator Hiro Murai had set the bar high; six years later, Little Foot Big Foot had big shoes to fill. 

Set in the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the US and shot in black and white, the film depicts Glover as the lead singer of a doo-wop trio called Johnny and the Pipes, booked to play at a jazz club. Unimpressed by their first impressions of the group, the room stays cold throughout their performance (the trio’s broad smiles masking the dark lyrics) until things worsen. 

Other than the strong political message, the parallels with This is America are best demonstrated by the choreography by Shay Latukolan, which similarly references African and African-American dance history, from jazz legend Cab Calloway to Beyoncé. 

Elsa y Elmar, Sangre Entre Las Piernas; Director: Frederick Venet

Given Sangre Entre Las Piernas translates into English as Blood Between the Legs, the music video that accompanies the track by the Columbian synth-pop singer had to be suitably … well, menstrual. 

Directed by French illustrator and street artist Frederick Venet, the animation follows a young woman as she goes on a date while a painful period rages inside of her. The film depicts her internal struggle as a psychedelic world where boobs grow on trees and vagina symbols appear everywhere. 

Her period is depicted as a big red snake which coils out of her vagina before she consequently swallows it whole, signifying her fight against symbols of social pressure and her embrace of her femininity. The date seemingly goes well. 

Sabrina Carpenter, Taste.; Director: Dave Meyers

While Sabrina Carpenter’s image might appear ‘Short n’ Sweet’, the singer has not been afraid to show off her devilish sense of humour as she catapulted into stardom this year. Riffing off the dark comedy Death Becomes Her, Dave Meyer’s music video for Carpenter’s hit single Taste was glossy and gory in equal measures in its depiction of an exaggerated feud between two women who have shared the same man. 

In keeping with the macabre theme, Carpenter appears opposite Jenna Ortega (the star of gothic hits Wednesday, Beetlejuice and Scream). Despite best efforts (involving voodoo dolls, chainsaws and Carpenter getting impaled by a sharp garden fence), both evade death but do end up killing the middleman while caught up in the heat of it all. 

Taste marks Meyers’ second video for Carpenter. Earlier in 2024, he shot Espresso, the song of the summer. The film has a vintage summer feel tinged with a darker edge as Carpenter gets arrested for nicking her lover’s credit card. That set up her following video, Please, Please, Please, which opens in prison as she meets her jailmate. 

Floating Points, Key103; Director: Akiko Nakayama

“I drop only the first ink, but science paints the details beyond that; it’s a great collaboration,” explained the Tokyo-based artist Akiko Nakayama to CR on manipulating liquids like paint to create fluid, transfixing visuals. 

Her kinetic ‘alive paintings’ perfectly matched the synthy dance tracks of Floating Point’s third studio album, Cascade. Nakayama worked with the DJ (real name Dan Shepherd) throughout his album launch and created videos for two previously released singles. She also joined him on tour to create improvisational visuals. 

Inky hues and cool tones seep through the Key103 video, directly influenced by Nakayama’s exploration of tree forms. She researched ‘dendritic paintings’ (dendritic referring to the branching forms of a tree) at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. 

FKA twigs, Eusexua; Director: Jordan Hemingway

Defined as a feeling of momentary transcendence often evoked by art, music, sex and unity, Eusexua, the title track on FKA twigs’ third album, required a suitably liberating music video.  

Almost eight minutes in total, the film is part music video, part experimental art film. It opens in a grey office as twigs rushes in, late to her mundane 9-5 job and its weird jargon. A phone call from an unknown dialer disrupts the scene, and the office workers break the mould, becoming free to express themselves in a glitchy dance sequence. The unfiltered expression continues throughout various vignettes where FKA twigs is in her natural element. The state of eusexua (euphoria and sexual) has been reached.

Who better to shoot FKA twigs for this than her partner Jordan Hemingway? He accompanied Eusexua with Perfect Strangers, which continues the office setting and grey colour theme, but the imagery gets even darker in parts. It includes cameos from Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Yves Tumor.