Ten Tonnes

Ethan Barnett performs as Ten Tonnes, an English singer and songwriter who stepped out from beneath the profile of his elder brother George Ezra by issuing a run of EPs across the second half of the 2010s. Although his work sits squarely inside indie pop, releases such as the 2018 single “G.I.V.E.” also revealed a taste for 1950s rock & roll and garage rock.

Barnett was born in Hereford in 1996. Both of his parents worked as teachers and nurtured his creative interests from childhood. He started on drums at nine, moved to guitar at fourteen, and later joined the drama club once attended by his brother George and sister Jessica, an experience that eased his childhood reserve. He enrolled in music at York University yet found little appetite for its academic demands.

Under the Ten Tonnes name he issued his first EP, Lucy, independently in 2016. The next year he made his Warner Bros debut with the Born to Lose EP. Refining his style further, he released the Cracks Between EP in 2018; its title track demonstrated his ability to anchor fuzzy indie pop with a melodic core. He followed that project with his self-titled debut album in 2019, which contained the same track alongside the lead single “G.I.V.E.”