“Talk” is a song about seduction. During the album release party, Hozier described the protagonist as an “unreliable narrator” who has “not the best intentions in mind,” as well as being “quite pretentious”. The protagonist of the song is using flowery language to encourage affection, but it is not sincere.

There’s all these lofty notions of, kind of, of true love, and lofty tales and kind of romantic language is used in the verses. And the chorus just admits to, like, “I’m only using this language to distract from the fact that I’m trying to seduce you here, for fear that you find out how I’m imagining you.”