Back in the indie-sleaze aughts, Manchester duo the Ting Tings splashed onto the neon scene with the edgy electropop cheerleader chant “That’s Not My Name.” Seventeen years later, they’re reflecting on that career on the sepia-toned, self-referential “Dreaming,” with frontwoman Katie White wistfully musing, “I don’t know if there is time/If we change our name/Someday, maybe we can make it someday/Maybe we can get it back/If we changed our name.”

“Dreaming” is the second single from the Ting Tings’ fifth album (and first studio album in seven years), Home. It’s an unexpectedly beachy and breezy soft-rock long-player that evokes Dire Straits, Eagles, Steely Dan (“Basically great bands back in the day, writing songs and playing their instruments, a big difference to what’s happening now,” quips the Tings’ Jules De Martino”); Mike Post TV show themes; and especially the lushly layered gauziness of Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac. Home marks such a beautiful rebirth, such a departure from the Tings’ indie-pop brattiness popularized by 2008 iPod ads, NME headlines, and Glastonbury and SNL appearances, that the duo did in fact consider changing their name for this release.

“We were ‘De Martino & White’ all the way up to a week before we did our first social media posts [promoting Home]. We’d done all our logo and everything!” White reveals with a chuckle.

“We created a new band in our heads called ‘De Martino & White,’ and we made a board and pinned up all those [soft-rock] bands,” De Martino recalls. “Katie cut out loads of pictures of all our favorites and put them on the board. Katie was pregnant and we’d just started. We had a grand piano in the hallway, we had all our amps and equipment all serviced, and we were feeling good about playing our instruments again. I remember playing piano, Katie was singing next to me, and we were writing stuff that sounded quite early Elton. Go back to I don’t know how many years before that, and we would’ve gone, ‘Oh no, we’re not doing that!’ But all of a sudden something happened, and we were embracing our favorite bands.”

“We let go of chasing ‘cool’ or the latest thing. We just wanted to just write good songs,” White explains. “We didn’t even know if we were going to tour again as ‘The Ting Tings’ — there’s so much weight to that first album — or even trying to be a band that’s relevant, whatever ‘relevant is.’ We just let it go. And we wrote the songs for us.”

photo courtesy of Muses PR

“We’ve given ourselves a chance to be the people we’ve always wanted to be,” adds De Martino. “I know that sounds a bit weird.”

On the contrary, it doesn’t sound weird at all. Sure, Home may not sound like the Ting Tings’ breakthrough debut album, We Started Nothing, but it sounds like one of the surprise best albums of 2025 so far, and it sounds like a fresh start. And as White points out, “It’s crazy how people would think it’s strange for a band, 16 years later, to not sound the same.  … We’re nearly two decades older! We’ve lived, we’ve lost, we’ve loved. We’ve had four different albums that all sound [different], but because they weren’t as successful as the first one, people would only know us from that. You are almost suspended in time for some people. And that’s lovely, but it’s not a reality.”

To White’s point, during the verse of “Dreaming,” she croons, “People may say, ‘What you doing now? Where have you been?’/We’ve been living life/Had some lows/We’ve had some highs.” She and De Martino have lived in different parts of the globe — including Berlin, where they recorded their “awkward second album” because, as De Martino notes, “Well, Bowie did it!” — and they now reside in Ibiza, where they’re raising their first child, a daughter, who inspired the sweetly sentimental Home duet “Song for Meadow.”

“A lot of things happened. We had something real to write about,” says De Martino. “We just sat there and started writing and recording, and it just came from our soul. I suppose [those ‘70s bands] gave us the freedom to have something real to write. Katie did a lot of the lyrics on this record, and she was becoming a mum and there were emotions going on. … The thing is, as writers, me and Kate had been writing together for 20 years or so, and the best songs we write, regardless of them being released, always come from a half-real place, if not a full real place. And this record came from a full real place. Having a child and going through whatever people do when they have a child, that’s a full deal. There’s no way out of that. There really isn’t.”

“There’s a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’” White laughs, as the couple chats with me via Zoom from their sun-dappled Ibiza kitchen, with their toddler, Meadow, adorably popping in occasionally during our interview. “It’s amazing, but there’s a definite life change.”

“My daughter’s taste in music now… her favorite song at the minute is ‘Peg’ by Steely Dan, and she’s like 4. We’re brainwashing her,” proud parent De Martino brags, laughing.

Meadow’s interview cameos, which couple allow to be shown on camera, are an example of how much the Ting Tings’ personal and professional lives are connected on the fittingly titled Home — which was composed and recorded entirely by De Martino and White in their Ibiza house, produced by De Martino (who played most of the instruments), and is being released on their own label, Wonderful Records. “We live in studios, really. That’s our happy space,” says White. “It’s so weird because everything’s so intertwined for us. Our music is us. It’s not a persona. Our songs are about us. It’s very weirdly intertwined. It’s very hard to separate it all. I think probably if we’d have ever split up, the band would’ve been done. But yeah, we weathered it.”

White is referring to the fact that she and De Martino are a romantic couple (they’re actually married now), something they kept on the down-low for years. In one memorable 2012 Guardian piece, when the interviewer picked up on their undeniable chemistry and flat-out asked them if they were, had ever been, or would ever consider becoming romantically involved, they even played coy and skirted the question. White and De Martino actually started dating before they’d formed their pre-Ting Tings group, Dear Eskiimo, but they didn’t want their personal story to be part of their public story.

“We never wanted to talk about it, because I feel like it was distracting, really,” explains White. “We weren’t massively into celeb culture. We went to about three red carpets, and we were terrible on them. We both couldn’t speak; I went bright red. And we both dressed terribly. We panicked, and then we avoided them. We didn’t do a lot of press or celeb parties; we just weren’t into that. We were quite private, really. The only thing now that stops us from being so private is our lovely daughter Meadow is here, and we don’t want to just lie about her.”

Unlike their obvious Home inspirations Fleetwood Mac, the Ting Tings are still happily partnered, which White smilingly says is “quite a nice story, I think. It’s a great story that we’re a couple and a band, and that we’ve managed to get to five albums.”

“We were a couple before we were a band; I think that’s the big thing,” says De Martino. “We valued each other outside of the band, because we were that before the band. And I think we still value each other.”

photo courtesy of Muses PR

De Martino says the fact that he and White could lean on each other during the Ting Tings’ early whirlwind with “That’s Not My Name” — a song, ironically, inspired by White’s frustrations with the record industry during their Dear Eskiimo era — “kept us in check.” So, when the Ting Tings returned the studio after years of nonstop promotion to record their sophomore album, Sounds From Nowheresville, and their label Columbia Records was “pushing us to get it done in five minutes,” De Martino says, “Maybe being a couple, we stand firm. Maybe if it was a four-piece band, we’d get swayed more and kind of stick on the same sound. … But we knew that we weren’t going to just produce another same record. It’s just not in us.”

“We were a band that wrote and recorded that first album ourselves. … And the first little stumble we had was we’d been touring for nearly four years,” White says of Sounds From Nowheresville’s difficult recording process, which ultimately led to them wanting to go independent. “We didn’t expect [the first album] to blow up like that. … It took four years to follow the success of that record and play shows to all these people, and I remember this strange feeling where everyone’s like, ‘How’s the second album going? And I was thinking, ‘We’ve not even stopped touring yet!’ When I listen to that [second] record now, there’s parts of it I really love, but I can hear that we were a band that had been performing on big stages for four years, because everything was over-articulated. Every space was filled, every sound was big, every layer. It was almost too much, because that’s the kind of performance you have to do on a big stage: You go from performing quite naturally on a small stage to by the time you’ve played 50 festivals, you are projecting more. And I feel like that’s what that second album was like. And what was disappointing was we felt very quickly after the first [Sounds From Nowheresville] single that the support from Columbia just dropped off.”

“Going back to the Fleetwoods and all those beautiful bands that we’ve loved, they spent time making their records. Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan took time to make records and they had ‘awkward’ albums and ‘awkward’ songs, and people just let them get on with it,” says De Martino. “They went through those ups and downs of trying to find themselves, and they were allowed to do it. It was part of their story. They didn’t have social media telling them they’ve got to film everything that they’re trying to write. They were stuck in studios for months. Maybe the only distraction they had was A&R men turning up with loads of drugs.”

“I don’t want to sound bitter — actually, it was a good parting that we had with [Columbia],” says White. “But I just felt like we weren’t treated like right. It’s almost like they treated us like a pop act and they went, ‘Oh, that didn’t work. Next!’ … I felt like ‘That’s Not My Name’ and those first songs had almost been overexposed as well, because when it’s funneled through that huge machine and you’ve got 2-year-olds and grandmas singing it and it’s on every TV show, it starts to feel like a different beast. It was only a few years later that the song kind of felt like ours again. … I don’t know if you can ever control songs like that, because they go so big; it goes out of your hands. But we almost wanted a break from ourselves for a year as well.”

Now, after a seven-tear break, the Ting Tings are reaching new audiences of all ages again, on their own terms, via TikTok — with both the revival of “That’s Not My Name,” and with the dreamy, harmony-laden Home single “Good People Do Bad Things,” which recently cracked the top 10 on the TikTok Music Chart. The Ting Tings have actually been playing some of their We Started Nothing tracks in the ‘70s soft-rock style of Home with a three-guitar band lineup (“It’s like being in the Eagles,! says De Martino), with “Shut Up and Let Me Go” even being effectively reimagined as a “sad Carpenters song.” The rearrangements have worked so wonderfully that the Ting Tings are already planning a deluxe edition of Home for fall 2025 that will include five re-recordings of their 2008 classics. And so, in a full-circle moment, the Ting Tings have truly and finally come home, so to speak.

“I remember at the time I was a little bit pissed off about it all, to be honest,” White says of the band’s early rise and supposed sophomore slump. “But it is probably the best thing that happened, because maybe we wouldn’t be together if we’d have stayed in that big machine. Maybe our lives would be different. Maybe we’d be burnt out after three more albums, whereas I feel like we’re just getting going now with this type of writing. We want to get old writing songs like this. So, I feel like what’s meant to be was meant to be for our band. And we’re quite at peace with it now.”