Songfacts®:

• This drum-heavy song continues the story told on Trench of Twenty One Pilots lead singer Tyler Joseph's alter ego, Clancy, being holed up in a mysterious walled city named Dema. A group of rebels - named Banditos – are helping the trapped people escape to Trench, a sort of purgatory-like place which is halfway between Dema and safety.
• It seems that Joseph escapes by learning to levitate and breathe fire. At the end of the track we learn he's successfully reached Trench.
• Joseph's rapid rhymes reference the ravenous vultures that loom around the Banditos' camp. There is a place in Dema where dead bodies are disposed due to vultures picking apart the corpses. The vulture imagery is prevalent throughout Trench and the scavenging birds are featured on the album's cover.
  
  The nine bishops that rule Dema keep control through a religion called "Vialism." Twenty One Pilots explained in a Reddit AMA that the vulture imagery is inspired by the "sad and intriguing concept of a dying religion... the reason it was dying was something they could never control: The lack of the vultures needed to carry out their theology. Something so natural and logical can get in the way of your religion."
• The video, directed by Twenty One Pilots' longtime collaborator Andrew Donoho, sees Tyler Joseph's head being shaved in a torch-lit mountain retreat before the band performs the song surrounded by fellow Banditos. It is the final installment in the three-part dystopian narrative series that began with the "Jumpsuit" clip and continued with their visual for "Nico And The Niners." Both the "Levitate" and "Nico and the Niners" clips were filmed in Ukraine.