What Happens When Your Biggest Hit Leads to an Existential Crisis?

Animation: Vulture; Photos: Redferns (Mariano Regidor, Martin Philbey)

The Ting Tings needed a lot of spins to hit the jackpot. After struggling for years in Manchester, England’s underground scene, Katie White and Jules De Martino signed a record deal with a small label in the mid-aughts thanks to, as White puts it, their “authentically punk, angsty, and naïve sound.” The label just didn’t know what to do with it. A full year languished, and the group, then known by a different name,...