From the album Silver Lining - Single
This is a love song about two people who think they're transgressive rebels headed for punishment, but they're actually just falling in love and calling it damnation to make it feel more dangerous than it is. The 'cruelty' they keep referencing has no actual teeth. What looks like gleeful self-destruction is closer to someone justifying why they deserve happiness by framing it as its opposite.
I've been falling in bad habits / Staring into the abyss / Drowning in red wine and sniffing cinnamon
Sniffing cinnamon, not even tasting it. This is someone performing danger while doing something as harmless as smelling a spice. The abyss-staring doesn't match the cozy domesticity of the actual details.
We've been kissing on the playground / Acting like little kids / Making dirty jokes and getting away with it
Getting away with what, exactly? The playground imagery undercuts any real transgression. She sounds surprised that being playful and silly with someone you're falling for is allowed, like joy itself needs to be reframed as rebellion to feel safe.
When you go to hell, I'll go there with you too / And when we're punished / For being so cruel
She never names what makes them cruel. The song aestheticizes sin without committing to any actual wrongdoing. Hell becomes a romantic destination rather than a consequence, which makes this less about damnation and more about wanting proof that the relationship is real enough to last through something.
I met you at the worst time / Fell in love on a whim / Now we pirouette in fields of rosy sin
Pirouetting is graceful, balletic, controlled. If you're pirouetting through your sins, you're not spiraling. The rosy coloring makes even their supposed destruction sound pretty, like she's painting doom in watercolors.
The silver lining's I'll be there with you
A silver lining is what makes a bad situation bearable, but she seems to want the bad situation itself. The company isn't the consolation prize for damnation. The damnation is the excuse to believe the company will last. I'm not sure she'd recognize that inversion if you pointed it out.
The narrator thinks she's written a song about two doomed lovers embracing their fall. What she's actually written is a song about someone so unused to being happy that she has to call it hell to let herself feel it. The punishment never arrives because there's nothing to punish. Just two people being silly and tender and mistaking that for danger.