Recently a video by the long-forgotten band Dear Eskiimo surfaced on YouTube. The song - Patience - was an oil-and-water mix of Gilbert and Sullivan and the acoustic introspective rock peddled by Alanis Morissette in the 1990s. That the band were dropped by Mercury before they even released the song was no surprise. That this was the former group of Katie White and Jules De Martino, aka the hotly tipped band the Ting Tings, was a surprise.

The biggest shock perhaps was that the video was uploaded by the duo themselves. But maybe that was the point. Instead of bad repressed pop memory that would come back to haunt them (think Duffy's Welsh Pop Idol past), the promo underlined where the Ting Tings had been and how far they had come.

Licking their wounds after the major label fallout, the twosome retreated to a Salford mill to live in an artistic commune, only to re-emerge last summer as the Ting Tings with That's Not My Name.

Released as a limited-edition 7in the song combined a shameless 1980s pop mentality (Bananarama meets the Belle Stars) with an unforgettable football chant of a chorus. The lyrics - White's response to the battery farm-like mentality of major labels - gave it gravitas. This was what they call a “pop moment”, and got the attention of bloggers and scenesters. The two singles that followed (the incessant Fruit Machine and the hummable Great DJ) could have come from the stables of Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, such was the strength of the pop songwriting.

Clearly their debut has a lot riding on its shoulders. Happily, We Started Nothing contains ten tracks of charming, lightweight pop. Shut Up and Let Me Go is all slinky basslines and glossy defiance, while We Walk starts off like a Burt Bacharach tune before re-buffing itself as half Haçienda house anthem and half rousing Spice Girls number.

And while We Started Nothing is never as inventive as anything released by their contemporaries New Young Pony Club, it would be stupid to write them off. Like Cher and cockroaches, the Ting Tings, it seems, will be around in one guise or another for a long time.

(Columbia, TMS £9.99, call 0845 6026328)

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010