Like Brooklyn's counterpart to Toronto's Broken Social Scene and San Francisco's Deerhoof, the Jealous Girlfriends turn eclecticism into a strength, shifting without effort from raucous Sonic Youth-inspired guitar freakouts to lyrical ballads colored by trip-hop keys while steering through an almost complete stylistic overhaul separating their debut from the follow-up. Formed in 2004, the group started as a duo of singer/guitarist Holly Miranda and multi-instrumentalist Alex Lipsen. Lipsen, who works as a producer and owns a studio, had already produced or engineered sessions for TV on the Radio, Son Volt, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; his Williamsburg facility, Headgear Recording, gave Miranda and Lipsen an informal setting to develop material during downtime.
The band's 2005 debut album, Comfortably Uncomfortable, was cut as a duo and issued on their own imprint; its opening single, "Lay Around," landed on an episode of the Showtime series The L Word and lifted the group's profile. After the record appeared, Lipsen's studio manager Josh Abbott joined on drums for live dates, yet his knack for singing and songwriting soon elevated him to co-frontperson alongside Miranda on guitar and vocals, with Lipsen switching to keyboards and Mike Fadem assuming the drum chair. Embracing a fresh identity as a democratic four-piece collective modeled on a scaled-down Broken Social Scene, the Jealous Girlfriends had every member contribute to the writing process and brought in outside players for select tracks, resulting in their markedly different self-titled second album in 2007.
