Still Making More Noise Than They Should

We Started Nothing got dismissed and I played it into the ground anyway. "Be The One," "Shut Up And Let Me Go," "We Walk"—three songs I wore out until they stopped sounding like songs and started sounding like a specific stretch of time. Katie White’s voice has an aggressive directness I find more compelling than a hundred careful singer-songwriters, and Jules De Martino drums like he’s winning an argument he started himself.

Their comeback single "Hands" arrived without a video, which turned out to be fine—just the track, existing on its own terms for a while before anyone put images to it. The same compressed, slightly combative energy as the debut: two people generating more noise than two people have any business generating, which is their whole method and also their best argument.

The second album, Kunst, was recorded entirely in Berlin, which makes complete sense. Berlin is where music goes to get strange without having to justify the strangeness to anyone, and The Ting Tings have always operated sideways to expectation. I put on "Hands" and it sounds like that city at two in the morning—not hostile, just awake and entirely unbothered by whatever you thought was going to happen.

Loving them unironically never embarrassed me. Critics who needed the debut to be something more serious were missing the point. Some music just wants to get you off the couch. That’s a complete sentence.