Eleven years of jamming with a bicoastal disco-punk collective whose rotating membership usually approached double digits could make anyone pine for a simpler stage and studio setup. So it was when lanky sometimes-frontman John Pugh left repetitively exclamatory party starters !!! in late 2007 to focus on his duo Free Blood with vocalist Madeline Davy.

"There are aspects of [!!!] that I miss," says Pugh by phone from the Free Blood's practice space in New York. "I like collaborating with lots of people bringing in different ideas and influences. But I think we, me and Maddy, kind of bounce off each other in a certain way—it's interesting to see what happens when you bring in just one other element and bounce off that."

The duo met through mutual friends shortly after Pugh moved to New York with !!! in 2001, and while they quickly hit it off, it took some time for them to actually get around to the business of making music.

"We'd see each other at parties all the time," says Pugh. "We had the idea to have a traditional party band that would just play at parties and not at rock venues. We talked about it for probably over a year before we ever played a note, but eventually we started playing, and it became more than just a party band."

After four years of doing Free Blood on the side, Pugh's departure from !!! has allowed the band to become a full-time endeavor. Asked if it's nice to only have one band to work on now, Pugh sighs with relief: "Ohhhhh yeah."

Free Blood's debut collection, The Singles—out on DFA/Rong Music, whose proprietor Ben Cook is a recent transplant to Seattle—gathers six original songs and five remixes (some previously released) to make for either a generous EP or a somewhat shifty full-length. Despite their streamlined core, Free Blood's sound reveals an expansive approach to the studio, where they pile on layers of vocals and instruments, often with help from their friends. On any given track, there are buzzing synths, live and programmed percussion, strutting bass, liquid guitars, strings, and plenty of reverberating room underpinning the dueling vocals.

"Never Hear Surf Music Again" finds Pugh and Davy trading lines about mind-altering chemicals over a slow-building bass-and-drums groove that progresses into a dazed chant, adding smeared guitars, then screeching, then sawed cello, to conclude with Pugh's falsetto refrain over an almost acoustic jangle. "Quick and Painful" amps the drums up to more manic, clipped intensities, adding synthesizer squeals that sound genuinely painful (for the synthesizer), with the duo reciting vaguely antagonistic commands that seem only abstractly aimed at the dance floor. Davy can be heard chatting beneath the racket, and the track ends with a noisy crescendo and then her laughing and asking, in the style of a studio outtake, "Did I destroy your ears?" Almost, but it was lovely.

"Grumpy" is the punkiest thing on the album's punk/funk continuum, though it again features that stately cello. First released back in July, the track looks forward, taking it to the unhinged bridge with a line about a "question for the president"—and here there's a long, pregnant pause filled only with feedback and a distorted guitar squiggle before Pugh jumps back in, voice a cartoonish low breath (like the sound one makes when imitating "the crowd going wild"): "Obama!" The lyrical meaning may be a little murky, or at least not obviously overjoyed, but given the extended !!! clan's broadly stated politics during the Bush years, one expects Free Blood's diplomatic relations to run much more smoothly under the new administration.

Nothing on The Singles comes close to rivaling !!! at their transcendent, triumphant best (the epochal "Me and Giuliani," "Intensify")—but then again, the songs Pugh sang with !!! were always less obvious anthems and more subtly soulful numbers, sexy rather than screaming, funky rather than frenzied, a style that carries over well to Free Blood.

"We didn't want it to just be drum-heavy dance music," says Pugh. "We wanted it to have a thread running through it with the vocals—to think of them as a centerpiece for everything that was happening rather than let the music kind of swallow them up."

Live, Free Blood can be anything from Pugh and Davy singing over largely prerecorded backing tracks to a four- or five-piece live band with drums, guitar, bass, keyboards, and nothing more "electronic" than a loop pedal. Either way, Pugh and Davy exude enough energy—equal parts sexual and lysergic—to make for a fully engaging show, and the band are committed to getting crowds loosened up.

"We want people to feel engaged, which means we engage with them—sometimes physically—to break up that tension, and to create other kinds of tension that are more stimulating."

Free Blood may be a more intimate affair, but they're still plenty stimulating enough to inspire some exclamation points of their own.