Marcel Winatschek

Rattling the Cage

Hands arrived in 2010 like The Ting Tings had never been away—which, to their credit, they hadn’t. Katie White and Jules De Martino were still making the same kind of noise: clipped, loud, that white-hot garage energy that had made We Started Nothing feel like a small explosion two years earlier. Two people generating considerably more sound than two people have any right to. The song stuck immediately, the way their best ones always do—not because it tries hard, but because it doesn’t seem to try at all.