Premiere: Cuesta Loeb, ‘Plug Into Me’ (full EP)

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Cuesta Loeb

Cuesta Loeb brings the creeping (and creepy) malaise about modern life to a slow simmer on her new EP, “Plug Into Me,” out Friday.

The release is the first new music since last summer from the L.A.-based project of singer-songwriter Christina Cuesta Loeb. It’s more restrained than the wall-of-sound, ’90s-styled shoegaze on that single, “Out Of,” and her previous releases, but no less compelling. And it finds Cuesta Loeb working with producer-songwriter Grey Goon (née Doug Walters), who has collaborated with another L.A. artist in the same musical galaxy, Oddnesse.

The two came in contact after Cuesta Loeb and Oddnesse had conversations about sharing the bill on a show. Some weekly Cuesta Loeb-Grey Goon sessions followed, resulting, she says, in “an EP made exclusively on Wednesdays.”

Over a musical palette that could be described as grunge lite, Cuesta Loeb frets about screens big and small — the electronic devices and televisions that masquerade as true connections and can suck the life out of relationships. She found a kindred spirit in Grey Goon.

“We happened to cross paths at a time when we were both feeling a certain unapologetic mood, and just got each other,” says Cuesta Loeb, who co-fronts her live band with her sister Lizzy. “It’s an unsettling time in general, politically and socially, and we’re so dependent on technology that it’s almost like life has become completely virtual. It just makes me feel weird. I feel like everything is being usurped by technology. I want to hang onto tangible things that I can hold. I still hand-write my calendars. When I am done, I send a picture to my partner so that he can know what I have going on. With Grey Goon, I could lean into this mood and it was a safe space to have these conversations.

“I’ve always been more comfortable expressing myself fully through music than in conversation. This is something I’m working on … I’d say ‘Plug into Me’ is saying ‘whatever, this is how I feel.’”

“Plug Into Me” is but four songs, but it has plenty of battery life.

||| Stream: “Plug Into Me” in it entirety

||| Live: Cuesta Loeb performs Aug. 12 at Resident, along with Dielines, Twin Oaks and Possible Oceans. Tickets.

||| Previously: “Out Of,” “Charlotte Hill,” “My King”