The 2010s File Feature
What Kind Of Man
What Kind Of Man: Florence + The Machine and the Emotional Reckoning at the Heart of How Big How Blue How Beautiful Florence + The Machine's third studio alb…
01 The Story
What Kind Of Man: Florence + The Machine and the Emotional Reckoning at the Heart of How Big How Blue How Beautiful
Florence + The Machine's third studio album, "How Big How Blue How Beautiful," arrived in June 2015 and was preceded by "What Kind Of Man," the album's lead single, which was released in March 2015. The single was released on Republic Records in the United Kingdom and internationally, signaling the band's ongoing relationship with Universal's global distribution infrastructure, which had supported their commercial ambitions since the early success of "Lungs" in 2009. "What Kind Of Man" announced a shift in the band's sonic presentation: where "Ceremonials" in 2011 had leaned into cathedral reverb and orchestral grandeur, the new single was more compressed, more rhythmically driven, with a guitar riff at its center that felt startling in the context of what Florence and the Machine had previously produced.
Florence Welch, the band's primary creative force, has spoken in numerous interviews about the emotional source material for "How Big How Blue How Beautiful," describing the album as emerging from the aftermath of a significant romantic relationship and the process of rebuilding herself in its wake. "What Kind Of Man" was the most direct and confrontational expression of that material, structured as an address to a person whose behavior had been simultaneously compelling and damaging. The song's emotional heat comes from the tension between attraction and anger, between the acknowledgment of what was real about the relationship and a clear-eyed assessment of its cost.
The production was handled by Welch in collaboration with producer Markus Dravs, who had worked with Arcade Fire and Bjork among others. Dravs brought a sensibility that complemented the band's desire for a more immediate, stripped-back sound while preserving the emotional scale that had always been central to their appeal. The guitar-forward arrangement represented a significant production departure for a band whose previous records had privileged harp, strings, and heavily processed percussion. Live drums featured more prominently, giving the track a physical urgency that some critics described as the most rock-oriented moment in the band's catalog to that point.
The music video directed by Vincent Haycock was shot in black and white and featured Welch in a series of striking visual tableaux that combined vulnerability and physical assertion. The video received considerable attention and helped drive streaming and YouTube engagement during the single's promotional period. The track debuted on the UK Singles Chart and received extensive radio airplay across Europe and North America, confirming that the shift in sonic direction had not alienated the band's existing audience and had potentially broadened it.
"How Big How Blue How Beautiful" debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and number four on the Billboard 200 upon its June 2015 release, giving the band their best American album chart performance to that point. The album's critical reception was exceptionally strong, with numerous publications placing it on year-end best-of lists and crediting Welch with having written some of the most emotionally honest material of her career. "What Kind Of Man" was central to that reception, cited regularly as the album's most dramatic and revealing moment.
Welch's profile in the months around the album's release was boosted further by a high-profile performance at the 2015 Glastonbury Festival, where she substituted for the Foo Fighters as a headliner after Dave Grohl broke his leg. That Glastonbury performance was widely considered one of the festival's most memorable headline sets in recent memory and created a news cycle that ran parallel to the album's commercial rollout, giving "How Big How Blue How Beautiful" and its lead single a visibility that extended well beyond the typical promotional campaign. For a song about emotional confrontation and the question of what one person owes another, the context of Welch commanding a massive outdoor stage added a biographical dimension that amplified the song's themes of assertion and self-recovery.
In the years since its release, "What Kind Of Man" has maintained a significant presence in Florence + The Machine's live setlists, typically positioned as a moment of high energy and emotional release within concerts that balance spectacle with intimacy. Its reputation as one of the band's most commercially and critically successful singles has remained stable, and it is frequently cited as the entry point through which new listeners discovered the band.
02 Song Meaning
Accountability, Desire, and the Limits of Forgiveness: The Meaning of What Kind Of Man
"What Kind Of Man" is structured as a direct interrogation, addressed to a person whose behavior the narrator has been attempting to understand and make sense of across a period of emotional upheaval. Florence Welch has consistently positioned the song as emerging from genuine autobiographical experience, which gives the interrogative at the center of the track a weight beyond rhetorical device. The question the title poses is not asked in anger alone; it is asked with the bewilderment of someone who recognized genuine connection in a relationship and cannot reconcile that recognition with the damage that same relationship produced.
The emotional architecture of the song is sophisticated in that it holds simultaneous registers: anger and grief, desire and disgust, the memory of what was real alongside the accounting of what it cost. Many songs about painful relationships default to one of these registers and develop it at the expense of the others, producing music that is satisfying in a simple way but lacks emotional complexity. Welch, in this song, refuses that simplicity, and the result is a portrait of how people actually experience complicated relationships rather than how they wish they did.
The physical imagery in the song, which Welch developed through a series of visceral and sometimes violent metaphors, reflects the way intense emotional experience registers in the body. Rather than describing feelings in abstract terms, the song locates them physically, in the body's responses to attraction and to pain. This physicality is characteristic of Welch's songwriting throughout her career, and it is particularly effective here because the song's subject matter is precisely about how the body and the emotions operate in sometimes contradictory ways, how one can feel attraction and revulsion simultaneously, how grief manifests as something physical rather than merely psychological.
The production choices reinforce the meaning with unusual precision. The guitar riff that drives the track has an abrasive quality that cuts against the more typically lush Florence + The Machine sound, and this abrasion is appropriate: the song is about friction, about the grinding quality of a relationship that simultaneously compels and wounds. The drums push the track forward with a physicality that mirrors the emotional urgency of the narrative, and the moments where Welch's voice rises into full-chest power feel like necessary releases of pressure that has been building throughout the verses.
Within the album's emotional arc, "What Kind Of Man" functions as an opening gesture of confrontation that sets up the more nuanced emotional processing that follows. The album progresses from anger and bewilderment toward something more complicated and ultimately more healing, and this song's position as lead single means it announces the territory the record will explore before the listener has the full context for understanding where the journey leads. Placed at the beginning of the album's emotional narrative, the song functions as a declaration that this record will not shy away from difficulty, that Welch is prepared to examine painful material without the mitigation of a premature resolution.
The critical attention that focused on the song as a statement of feminine assertiveness within pop music was not entirely wrong, though it sometimes reduced the song's complexity to a simpler message of empowerment that the track itself resists. Welch is not simply declaring her freedom from a bad relationship in this song; she is genuinely wrestling with how such relationships happen, how intelligent and self-aware people find themselves in situations that damage them, and what it means to want to understand something that may ultimately resist understanding. That willingness to remain with the difficulty of the question rather than rushing to a satisfying answer is what distinguishes "What Kind Of Man" from simpler treatments of similar material, and what accounts for its enduring resonance with listeners who recognize their own experience in its emotional honesty.
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