Timothy Heller and Jared Maldonado of Dresses didn’t end up connecting on—and off—the stage overnight. Things started with messages being left on Facebook. A subsequent face-to-face meeting led to the two hanging out at Portland, Oregon, coffee shops and movie nights, this in turn fostering a working relationship and YouTube covers of songs by the likes of Frank Ocean and Foster the People.

Eventually, Dresses hit the studio to record a devastatingly perfect pop single titled “Blew My Mind”, threw it up on the Internet, and was surprised to find that labels started calling. Today, you’ll find the duo on SideOneDummy, the powerhouse Los Angeles indie that’s given us acts like Gogol Bordello and the Gaslight Anthem, with their charming debut full-length, Sun Shy, winning praise for its ambitiousness.

For purely selfish reasons, Maldonado (vocals-guitar) is thrilled about all of this, and only partly because Heller (vocals-piano-ukulele) is now his girlfriend.

“I had a crush on her in high school when I first saw her band play,” the Y-chromosome member of Dresses confesses, on the line from his home in Portland. “She was in a band with a bunch of guys from my high school. They played at our school’s battle of the bands, and so did I. I was in a really heavy hardcore-metal band, and she was in this really amazing indie-type band. They played right after us. We finished screaming and sweating and drooling, and they get on and were so beautiful and good.”

Looking back, it should have been obvious to the two that they were onto something before they officially hooked up.

“The first time I actually hung out with Timothy we’d never met in person,” Maldonado says. “She was on her way over to my house when she texted me and said, ‘I’m on the bus and about five minutes away.’ I was kind of freaking out, going, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to work on, and I don’t have any ideas.’ So I sat down and wrote the first half of ‘Blew My Mind’ on guitar. When she got to my house, I showed it to her, and we pieced a good part of the song together.”

From that gold-star beginning has come a band that might fit under the indie-pop umbrella, but isn’t content to stay there. Built around his-and-hers vocals (with Heller sounding winningly like the missing link between Regina Spektor and Lykke Li), songs range from the paisley-print pop jam “Painting Roses” to the crunchy folk rocker “Gotta Love”. Dresses isn’t afraid to take the lights down low for a piano anti-ballad like “Sticks and Stones”, but it will then crank up the amps for a track like the guitar-jacked “Tell a Lie”.

“Something that we were—I don’t want to say worried about—but were concerned with was that the songs tend to sound a bit different from each other,” Maldonado says. “In the end though, that diversity is what we were most proud of. We were like, ‘If you hear one song and you don’t like it, you should be able to find another that you’ll enjoy.’ ”

The blogosphere was quick to embrace Dresses. Taking a bit longer were Maldonado’s folks.

“My parents weren’t too stoked on my doing this because, like anyone, they have big dreams for their kids,” he says. “But one night my mom came out to a show I was doing with my old band, and was blown away by how many people had shown up. The next day she phoned me and said, ‘I just sold some of my great grandmother’s gold. I’m going to buy you a new guitar and amp.’ That was a real turning point in my parents thinking ‘Hey, this might actually work.’ ”

And as wonderful as that story is, it’s not as cute as the one about how Heller and Maldonado realized they were meant to be boyfriend and girlfriend as well as bandmates.

“We hung out for a long time, starting in January of 2012,” he recalls. “I felt like it was obvious I had a mega-crush on her, just googly eyes all the time, but felt like she was kinda ‘Ummm, don’t know…’ What happened is that I came back from a tour with a friend, and she was like, ‘I don’t think that I want to not date you anymore.’ That’s when it was like, ‘Okay, now it’s official.’ ”