“Yoü and I,” a country-tinged pop single off Lady Gaga’s multi-genre 2011 album Born This Way, addresses the very relatable experience of pining for the one you love. But its video features the less common experiences of making out with oneself, having mermaid sex and dancing in a leather strappy get-up inside a creepy barn.
For weeks, followers of Gaga’s Twitter feed have been receiving teaser tweets about the highly anticipated video, which was supposed to officially premiere August 18 on “MTV First: Lady Gaga.” The 25-year-old icon even declared on August 2 that “The Music Video for ‘Yoü and I’ will be my 1000th Tweet.” But when Perez Hilton leaked the video on Tuesday, the pop singer was forced to debut it herself before MTV’s scheduled run, therefore her 1000th tweet, which she posted Wednesday instead of today, included a link to the video with the words: “You must love all + every part of me, as must I, for this complex + incomprehensible force to be true.”
(PHOTOS: The World Goes Lady Gaga)
Mother Monster’s newest music video is weird, as usual, and features alter ego Yuyi, a nipple-less mermaid with an exquisite black fin. The video offers the stylish and strange aesthetic that helped propel Gaga to international fame, and starts off with a stunning silhouette of the artist in black. For the next several minutes, expect dirty feet in lethal stilettos, mermaid sex, gas masks, periodic pelvic thrusts, and a man who is either a sexy scientist or evil torturer—or both.
Various personas are plenty, including Gaga’s male alter ego, Jo Calderone, the grease monkey who smokes on top of the piano that Gaga is playing in the middle of a cornfield. They kiss, which translates to Lady Gaga making out with Lady Gaga in drag.
The video, shot in Nebraska last month, “is about taking a journey to win back the one you love,” Lady Gaga told MTV. “I wanted the video to be about me sprinting back and walking hundreds of thousands of miles to get him back.”
Check out the video above, but unless your boss is a Gaga fan, it’s NSFW.
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Kai Ma is a TIME contributor. Find her on Twitter at @Kai_Ma or on Google+. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.