Asking your crush to the prom isn’t the same these days. You can’t just come out and say it. You need a stunt—a “promposal,” if you will. Over the past 15 years, high school “promposals” have grown increasingly elaborate. There was the kid who snuck an alarm clock into his paramour’s room and programmed it to wake her up at 3 a.m. with a promposal message. There were the students who surprised their would-be dates with a Jason Mraz singalong. There were parody songs, loudspeaker announcements—even a soccer player who removed his shirt mid-game to reveal a prom invitation written on his chest.

For a brief and bewildering stretch of the 2010s, this mindset—let’s call it Promposal Syndrome—infiltrated the music industry, particularly indie rock circles. Suddenly, every album rollout had to be accompanied by a conceptual stunt designed to seize the attention of the media, fans, or both. Arcade Fire’s Win Butler never scribbled a release date on his bare chest, but some of these PR stunts were rather bizarre, involving blimps and bus routes and hijacking the aux cord at the airport. Of course, surreal PR stunts predate the decade, from the Sex Pistols chartering a river boat to mock Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, to Sony sending a massive Michael Jackson statue floating down the Thames. But elaborate stunts are now no longer reserved for big acts with massive promotional budgets (only three acts on this list would qualify as such). In the middle part of this decade, such antics began to seem mandatory for every mid-tier indie group with a decent publicist and a burning desire to differentiate themselves from the herd.

There are several reasons why eccentric album rollouts were unavoidable circa 2013 to 2016. One is the explosion of viral media. As BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and countless knockoff sites pioneered new strategies for making content blow up on Facebook—and these publishing strategies trickled into the music press—bands and publicists were increasingly eager to tap into the viral landscape as a promotional tool. Another likely factor was the drop in sales as the music industry shifted to streaming; conventional strategies of putting out music seemed more unreliable than ever.

Lastly, the emphasis on conceptual stunts lungeing for media attention can be regarded as a reaction to the Surprise Album Drop Era. The out-of-the-blue Beyoncé release in late 2013 changed everything. Albums needed to be major news events. While pop stars were eager to follow Beyoncé’s lead, bands less famous than, say, Wilco (who did surprise-release an album in 2015) didn’t have the luxury of surprise-dropping an album and expecting the world to care. “We couldn’t risk doing something like that,” Tanlines’ Jesse Cohen told me in 2015, for an article about his band’s album-promo stunts. “We worked for two years on this album. We have to do everything we can to make sure people know it exists.” Thus, the Surprise Album Drop Era occurred contemporaneously with the Weird Album Rollout Era, which hasn’t ended so much as settled down.

Here are 10 of the most memorable and, in a few cases, deranged rollout strategies from this decade. Each of these examples corresponds with an album release, with the exception of the infamous YACHT hoax, which was devised for a music video (it’s included here because it represents the tasteless nadir of this trend). Surprise album releases are not included for a very simple reason: The Beyoncé drop was notable not because of its pre-release promotional strategy but because of the total lack thereof.

March–May 2013: Daft Punk Premieres Random Access Memories in Rural Australian Town

Before “Get Lucky” made Daft Punk’s return unavoidable, the French duo went to the ends of the earth to make us aware of their first album in eight years. Inspired by the rock’n’roll billboards that lined the Sunset Strip in the 1970s, Daft Punk and their team at Columbia began the campaign by plastering large-scale posters of the members’ masks in cities around the globe. Then, at Coachella, a sleek trailer for Random Access Memories materialized on the jumbotrons before Arcade Fire’s headlining set, surprising festival-goers with a glimpse of the robots, Pharrell, Nile Rodgers, and their future hit.