Mykki Blanco has released a video for “High School Never Ends”, the first single from his soon-to-be-announced debut album. Led by grand string arrangements courtesy of producer Woodkid, it’s a stirring song that’s quite unlike anything that the rapper/performance artist has released before. It comes following a series of mixtapes, singles, and EPs over the past four years.

The video, directed by Matt Lambert and filmed in Freyenstein, Germany, plays like a queer retelling of Romeo & Juliet, its narrative told in a non-linear fashion. “To me the film is nothing more than a story of love and hate,” says Lambert. “It’s a love story wrapped in the cyclical nature of conflict that humans seem to thrive on. It’s a story of the moral relativity and polarizing forces of humanism and a simultaneous misanthropy that seems to live in all of us.”

“I have been living in Europe on and on since 2012,” Mykki adds. “I’ve seen Europe change, I have seen the surface of acceptance and the novelty of my brown skin become a frown in a public square, a belligerent rant in grocery store with a cashier telling me to ‘Go Back to My Own Country’… This story is about outsiders, forbidden love... when the Far Left & the Far Right are willing to go to any extreme to prevail in their truth.”

Lambert explains to Dazed that the video was devised over a five-month period. “The look and feel of the video has been built on several years of film projects I’ve been making in Berlin, like Alphatier, Libertine for Patrick Wolf, Heile Gänsje with Dazed, (and) War with Keith Flint,” he tells us, “I was specifically after a place that had a fairytale quality and at the same time the harsh contrast of the DDR and the village of Freyenstein offered us the specific topography of conflict and transition.”

Watch the video below, and check out a gallery of behind-the-scene photos courtesy of Lambert above.