Gigi Perez walked into a Brooklyn restaurant last week with a toothpick wedged in her mouth, stood up after dinner and slid in another one. She had glanced at a clear box of them sitting on the table periodically, like she was seeking comfort or reinforcement. But for two hours, she mostly kept her gaze fixed to the side, avoiding eye contact while she spoke — as she often finds herself doing — about death.
“Getting older, watching the people in your family get older — I feel like I’m on a conveyor belt that’s going to this inevitable end,” she said.
At 25, Perez speaks with a weariness of someone at least twice her age. She was at one of her favorite Japanese spots in Williamsburg, not too far from where she used to live; she was days away from releasing her debut album and 10 hours from a brutally early wake-up call for “The Today Show.”
Like many young musicians, Perez is figuring out what comes next after virality. Her lilting, guitar-powered anthems have blazed through TikTok, amassing millions of streams and a fervent fan base. “Sailor Song,” a ballad about lusting after a girl who looks like Anne Hathaway (yes, it was based on a real woman), went platinum and has been planted on Spotify’s most-streamed songs in the United States for months; it became a No. 1 single in the United Kingdom last fall. But Perez’s career hasn’t been built on celebration. She is carving a catalog out of grief.
One of her first songs to garner attention on SoundCloud, “Sometimes (Backwood),” took off six months after her older sister, Celene, died suddenly in 2020. Perez’s LP, “At the Beach, in Every Life,” released less than a week ago, is largely a tribute to her. It is also an attempt to shape and sharpen the last, often rudderless years of her own life.
“I feel like I have a certain badge of experience —” She paused. “That has opened a really deep kind of pain that is possible for anyone to go through.”
Perez declines to discuss the specifics of her sister’s death. But Celene is all over the album. Snippets of her voice mail messages float in, wishing Perez luck before a show at a cafe: “You’re gonna kill it. Bye, baby.” Onstage for a prerelease show at Irving Plaza on April 23, Perez looked straight up into the lights as a recording of Celene singing opera boomed out of the speakers, part of “Survivor’s Guilt,” an instrumental interlude.
“She’s so witty, she’s so quick,” said Marie Ulven Ringheim, the Norwegian singer who performs as girl in red and who toured with Perez last November. “But she has that emotional depth of someone who has gone through an exceptional amount of grief.”
Perez was born in New Jersey to parents of Cuban heritage and raised mostly in southern Florida. Her parents sent their four daughters to a Christian school. Celene loved to act and sing — she dreamed of making it to Broadway — and Perez followed her to local theater productions, usually ending up in the ensemble. When she was 15, she started to write songs in earnest, fiddling around with piano, ukulele and guitar. She binge-listened to Troye Sivan and Hayley Kyioko, queer artists whose work she said “literally saved my life”; Kyioko’s “Girls Like Girls” became a kind of lifeline.
“When you’re a kid, music is verbalizing things you don’t know how to say — you don’t have the vocabulary to understand. You’re discovering how you feel in real time,” she said. She wanted to follow in their footsteps: “I wanted to do that back,” she explained. “I wanted to be part of that wheel.”
Perez attended Berklee College of Music, but left after losing her sister. She kept trying to write, eventually coming up with a song she named after Celene: “Mom and Dad are always crying / and I wish I knew what to do / and I wish you knew how much I miss you,” she wails. Soon after, she uploaded “Sometimes (Backwood)” to SoundCloud, and suddenly it felt like everything was happening. Perez signed to Interscope; she opened for Coldplay and Noah Cyrus; she moved to Bushwick. In the summer of 2023, she went to London to play a monthlong run of shows.
Then, two days after her first performance there, her ascent suddenly paused: Interscope dropped her. Perez remembers pacing around her un-air-conditioned room in London, sweating, paralyzed by not knowing what would happen next. She listened to “Breathe,” from “Into the Heights,” Celene’s favorite musical — a “failure song,” Perez said. Celene wanted to be the singer who made it, Perez added, saying she felt she was letting them both down.
Maybe an hour later, she flopped across the bed and wrote “At the Beach, in Every Life,” the title track from the album — a quiet, strident song about a lover’s reassurance.
When she returned to the United States Perez moved back to her childhood home. She felt like she was going backward. She rode her bike; she went to hot yoga classes; she tended to her three Chihuahuas. She poked around for freelance work online, looking for a way to make $100 at a time. And she turned her bedroom into a makeshift studio, padding the walls in black foam, messing around with the music software Ableton as she learned to produce her own songs.
The music she wrote in that period, steeped in a sense of haunting, became the album. She thought about her grandmother and uncle who died weeks apart, just months before Celene. Perez would sometimes stay up until 5 or 6 in the morning, frenetic and frightened.
“It wasn’t until there was nobody, there was nothing going on, that the bigger questions started to come,” she said. She realized, “I’m so scared of death. And I don’t know what I believe in. And I don’t have a sense of stability.”
She was raised to be an evangelical Christian, anchored in a certainty that cracked as she got older and came out as a lesbian. The day that the Supreme Court issued its ruling granting same-sex couples the right to marry in all states, she was at a megachurch conference in a Georgia arena. A pastor took the mic to pray for the state of the country.
When Perez speaks about growing up in the church now, she refers to it as “indoctrination.” She still prays sometimes, mostly in the shower; she would like to believe something is listening. Much of the album traces that dichotomy — the pull to faith, and the inability to fully feel it. “When I lifted her urn / Divinity says, ‘Destiny can’t be earned or returned,’” she sings in “Fable,” her voice low-pitched and resonant, building until she repeats “I dream of eternal life.” She studs her songs with references to hymns, images of Jesus’s feet, allusions to judgment day.
Nowhere is this more present than on “Sailor Song,” the biggest hit of Perez’s budding career. “I don’t believe in God, but I believe that you’re my savior,” she chants in the chorus. Perez posted part of the song on TikTok last February while in the Florida Keys with her family, after a dinner celebrating her little sister’s birthday. TikTok bills it as one of the most listened-to songs ever on the platform, with videos using the track having been viewed more than 22 billion times.
Joe Jonas and Tate McRae covered it; The Chainsmokers remixed it. Last fall, buoyed by the success of “Sailor Song,” Perez signed again, this time to Island Records. (Chappell Roan, who was also dropped by a major before releasing her debut album, is her label mate now.)
For now, Perez is still synonymous with “Sailor Song”: At her Irving Plaza show, clusters of nautical hats dotted the crowd. Someone held up a poster with the words “Gigi you are my savior” in all caps. Midway through the concert, some fans Perez recognized from one of her earliest New York gigs wedged their way to the front and passed her a ukulele. One of the first songs she remembers writing, she said, back when she was 15, was a ukulele track.
“We’ve come a long way since then,” she added, sweeping her hair behind her. “All it takes is a few little traumas, and then —” she laughed. “And then you’re there.”
Dani Blum is a health reporter for The Times.
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