In an interview with The Skinny, Hackman said about this track:

Weirdly, if I look at it now in context of the whole record, it’s one that’s probably more similar to [We Slept at Last] out of the bunch, but at that moment it felt different to me. It just felt a little bit more direct, you know? I didn’t feel like I had to keep pushing away from songwriting norms to do something different; I felt like I had room to do something different within a sphere that already exists. That was actually such a liberating thing to begin to understand.

She told DIY that ‘Violet’ was mainly about sex:

It felt like an open door in my brain,” she comments. Lyrically, it’s a plainly lust-charged song, paving the way for the rest of the album. “Very, very sexy,” she grins. “Maybe it’s because [‘Violet’ is] kind of bridging that gap [between the debut album and the follow-up] but it’s still got loads of metaphors in it. But they’re sexy metaphors!”