A 2000s hit duo has made a comeback this year with a very different look and sound.
The Ting Tings, best known for the songs “That’s Not My Name” and “Shut Up and Let Me Go,” recently returned with a new album. But instead of Katie White and Jules De Martino’s energetic indie pop sound, the group has expanded into a nine-piece band inspired by 1970s rock artists.
“After five albums and a roller coaster in and around the music industry, we took a little bit of time off to raise our daughter,” White and De Martino explained in a recent video on Instagram. “And we’ve now found ourselves living on the beautiful island of Ibiza, off the coast of Spain. We’ve loved experimenting with our sound and songwriting over the years.”
“And we’ve currently spent four years making the album of our dreams, inspired by bands like the Eagles, Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac and Supertramp,” they continued. “We’ve recently been playing shows as a nine-piece band and we have completely fallen in love with kind of touring like those bands from the ‘70s. So we have that dream. Everyone keeps telling us we’re crazy and that bands don’t really tour as a nine-piece band anymore, but that’s what we’re aiming for next summer.”
De Martino and White, who are now married with one child, formed The Ting Tings in the mid-2000s. The England duo reached hit the top 10 in the UK and the top 40 in the U.S. with the frenetic “That’s Not My Name,” from their 2008 debut album “We Started Nothing.” They also had success with the bouncy “Shut Up and Let Me Go,” featured in an Apple iPod commercial, as both singles went platinum.
But the group intentionally shifted their sound on all subsequent albums, De Martino told NPR. 2012’s “Sounds from Nowheresville,” 2014’s “Super Critical,” and 2018’s “The Black Light” failed to see the same popularity as their debut.
Then “Home,” released in June, became their hardest pivot yet.
White has described it as an “easy breezy, mellow, kind of summer hazy album” reminiscent of songs like Bread’s “Make It With You.”
“It was 2020 lockdown. We had our child, and we didn’t know if we were going to make another record as The Ting Tings. We actually called ourselves De Martino and White,” White told NPR. “And just started writing songs, thinking, no one’s probably going to hear them. We’re probably not going to tour it. We’re just madly in love with our child, locked in with Covid. And that way of writing, which took the pressure off and just took the weight of maybe how people would have expected us to sound. But I feel like we got to that place again where we just wrote songs that we loved, songs that just we wanted to grow old writing.”
They still perform classic Ting Tings songs, though they now sing “That’s Not My Name,” “Shut Up and Let Me Go,” “We Walk,” “Great DJ” and “Be the One” in their new style. That may especially surprise fans of “That’s Not My Name,” that has continued to be popular online thanks to social media trends and TikTok video memes.
“It’s a very frustrating song about feeling invisible and forgettable,” White told Vulture. “Everybody knows that song, which was amazing because we didn’t expect it to do anything. As soon as we put it up on MySpace, it instantly clicked with people. But you could feel it was oversaturated.”
“To be clear, we loved the song and loved touring at that point,” De Martino told Vulture. “We got to see the whole world six times over. But we knew once that song got so big, it was going to be much more difficult to be the people we were when we made it.”
The Ting Tings’ “Home” is currently available on all major music platforms. 2026 tour dates have not yet been announced.
