Songfacts®:

• This song finds a frustrated Florence Welch singing of a wishy-washy man. It's about her on-again, off-again boyfriend, whom she finally broke up with.
  
  Welch hasn't revealed his identity but she says this relationship lasted a few years and covered a time in her life when she was having maybe a bit too much fun - she often found herself waking up in strange places and wondering what happened the night before. This guy was a fun companion but not stable enough to stay by her side when she got out of her party phase.
• "What Kind Of Man" is part of the third Florence + the Machine album, How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, released in 2015. The album moved away from the harp-filled sound of their first two albums and more into rock territory.
  
  "It's got very loud guitars and that was very fun to record actually," Welch said of the song. "Trying to get exactly the right tone of guitar - I never realized how complicated that is."
  
  "It took us forever," she added. "Every day there'd be a different guitar sound. We ended up layering with three different guitar sounds, one on top of the other, in order to create this one song."
• This is one of several tracks that Welch wrote for How Big... at Chateau Marmont, which can be found on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Throughout the years, the hotel has gained recognition as a popular location for rock stars and actors - John Belushi, for instance, died of a drug overdose in one of its garden bungalows. She told NME: "LA is a total dreamland and it played a big part in this record. There is definitely a portal to the underworld. There are two if you're not careful."
• The video is a short film that starts with Florence Welch and a man talking about how suffering brings people closer together as they drive down a country road. We see their tumultuous relationship unfold as scenes of the couple driving at various points in their time together are mixed with examples of Welch involved in other unhealthy affairs. "Suppose if you've been through something catastrophic, like a storm or an earthquake together, something horrendous... it'd bring you together. But what if they are creating disaster within themselves?" asks Welch in the clip.
• The video was inspired by the toxic relationship that also inspired the song. "For that video, we were thinking about ideas of purgatory and Dante's Inferno," she told Billboard magazine. "Because I was in this purgatory with this man. That push and pull thing where you are just stuck and you're like, 'Why do we keep doing this to each other?'"
  
  "It's an aggressive song, but I can see my own part in the whole process," Welch added. "I was just as crazy as he was. People think the men in the video represent my ex-boyfriends, but they really represent a lot of different forces that weren't working for me."
• Welch wrote the song with singer-songwriter Kip Harpoon, a songwriter she collaborated with on her 2011 hit "Shake It Out." His other credits include Calvin Harris' "Sweet Nothing" and Jessie Ware's "Wildest Moments."