From the album Foreign Tongues
This is a song about refusing to look at what you already know. The psychic vomits and cries when she sees his future, and instead of asking why, he just keeps moving. That refusal to process the terror gets dressed up as defiant nihilism, but dancing in the flames isn't bravery. It's dissociation.
A sandwich board read the end of the world is nigh / I looked up and saw the billionaires all scuttling / Scrambling to their bolt holes in the sky
The apocalypse is already happening, visible enough that street preachers and billionaires both know it. His reaction is to notice it like weather, then immediately pivot to football on Saturday night.
Through the gloom I asked her, 'What's my future?' / Well, she threw up and then broke down and cried / Tears in her eyes / But I kept moving on
This might be the most honest moment in the song, and he refuses to engage with it. She sees something so bad she physically cannot speak it, and he treats that like a bad Yelp review. Just keeps moving.
When the walls cave in / And the lights go dim / And I drag you out again / Well, dystopian values are too hot to handle
He positions himself as the rescuer when disaster hits, the guy who'll drag you out and come to your rescue. But he's the one who insisted divine intervention is out of the question. He's trying to be the savior he says doesn't exist.
Divine intervention / Is out of the question / And I'm going to dance in the flames
This sounds like defiance, but it's actually surrender framed as control. If life's just a gambling game with no higher power watching, then treating catastrophe like a party isn't reckless. It's the only move left. I'm not sure he believes that, though.
The gambling game framing is doing a lot of work here. It lets him treat catastrophe as random chance instead of consequence, so dancing in the flames feels like freedom instead of fatalism. But the psychic knew something specific, not random. He just decided not to find out what.