Album: The Ting Tings, We Started Nothing (Columbia)

The drum is everything. The Ting Tings may have more hooks than your local angling club, but those monstrously, maddeningly memorable sing-song melodies are built on a thumping football-terrace beat that drives the message home.

Katie White and Jules De Martino have hit upon an uncanny knack of wedding irresistibly clappable rhythms to New Wave/power-pop tunes reminiscent of the Cars, the Pretenders, Blondie and the Knack, most notably on the single "That's Not My Name", which is surely destined to be chanted by playground pre-teens as fervently as "The Clapping Song" in decades past.