The band was formed by Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewsbury in 2001 with Rob Jones and Simon Wright joining in 2003.Much of their early work consists of remixes and mash-ups of mainstream pop artists such as Christina Milian, Natasha Bedingfield and Justin Timberlake.

One such mash-up, "White Noise Christmas" (for which a video later appeared on their DVD Volume 3: The Kids Have Eyes), featured on the first Boomselection compilation CD.

In the same year, the band also remixed "...Spooks the Horse", a track by Youthmovie Soundtrack Strategies, for inclusion on the reissue of their first album, Hurrah!

The track "Don't Go Down to Sorrow" was released as a single three weeks before this on 9 April,[4] backed by a new song, "Morning in the Knife Quarter", and a remix of "The Major Cities of the World Are Being Destroyed One by One by the Monsters", a version of which appeared as a B-side on the "Retreat!

A live album, Escape from New York, was released on 20 April 2009 in the UK and 18 August 2009 in the US, featuring recordings from the Madison Square Gardens and Radio City Music Hall gigs.

[10] First reviews of the album state that the band is going further away from the post-rock sound of their beginning and turning toward an electronic style, using more synthesizer and less electric guitar and live drums.

This release contains other recordings from the Exploding sessions which hadn't found a place on the album, as well as a cut down edit of "Tiger Girl".

The EP was made available to pre-order in a number of bundles, ranging from just the album to a "Super-Deluxe" package including exclusive merchandise.

In July 2012 it was announced that a deluxe version of 'We Were Exploding Anyway / Heavy Sky' would be released in Australia through Bird's Robe Records, featuring the additional tracks 'Memorydress' and 'After San Francisco' as well as a new remix of 'Tiger Girl' by Australian instrumental group sleepmakeswaves.

In July 2011, the band announced their intention to fund a studio recording of the Silent Running soundtrack by raising $7500 through the crowd-funding website Indie Gogo.

Silent Running was released in mid-November 2011 as a numbered, limited edition vinyl LP to those Indie Gogo funders who had paid for this option, and as a digital download from the band's website.

In 2016, the band worked with developers of the procedural sci-fi exploration game No Man's Sky to create an in-game soundtrack which itself worked procedurally: the band recorded sounds and melodies (often with multiple variations) which were then combined dynamically by the game to create music in response to situations and player actions.

[13][14] The band also created ten original works and six soundscapes from the material and released them on the game's companion soundtrack album, No Man's Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe, in August 2016 as digital and retail formats.

[16] In October 2017, the band announced a new work entitled Decomposition Theory or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Demand the Future, featuring algorithmic music and live coding techniques, with the first performances taking place as part of Sheffield's Algomech Festival during November 2017.

[18] In April 2019, 65daysofstatic announced Unreleased/Unreleasable Volume 4: A Year of Wreckage, consisting of monthly extended plays released throughout 2019, composed from the Decomposition Theory project.

The origin of the name is unclear, with the band once stating that they took their name from an unreleased John Carpenter film called Stealth Bomber, starring Kurt Russell, that they had formed to create the soundtrack to.

Other theories include that the band took their name from the CIA's 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état during which the CIA put a white book instrument to use according to which 65 days of disabling the communication systems of a nation while spreading propaganda is enough to overthrow a country,[24] or, as put forward by New Statesman, that the name was derived from psychological experiments conducted in the 1950s to 1960s, in which it was found that exposure to 65 days of white noise (or static) would render the listener insane.

[22] In 2006, they played to their biggest crowd yet at that year's Summer Sonic festival in Japan, alongside such bands as Metallica, Lostprophets, Linkin Park, and Deftones.

They made guest appearances on the band's 2006 and 2007 UK tours, and also produced the majority of their music videos, including "Radio Protector", "Drove Through Ghosts to Get Here" and "Don't Go Down to Sorrow".

The band were to embark on their first world tour in March 2010, playing shows in Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan), America (at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas), and Europe.

[31] The name was also used by now defunct fansite 65kids.com which hosted ‘torrents, music videos, unreleasable pop mashup albums, remixes, DVDs, tour diaries, live recordings, and radio sessions'.