Gigi Perez

About Gigi Perez

Gigi Perez spent years making music in relative obscurity before the internet decided it was her turn. The New Jersey-born, LA-based artist grew up between Puerto Rico and Florida, writing songs in her bedroom that nobody really heard until 2023 rolled around and changed everything.

She'd been releasing music since 2022, posting tracks that lived in that specific corner of indie pop where bedroom production meets actual vocal ability. Early songs like Coffee and Mess It Up had the lo-fi bedroom pop aesthetic down, but there was something more polished underneath. Her voice does this thing where it sounds simultaneously fragile and completely controlled, which turned out to matter when TikTok got involved.

Sailor Song dropped in 2024 and became one of those unexpected viral moments that artists either dream about or dread depending on how it goes. The song's chorus about kissing in downtown bars hit during a specific moment in queer internet culture, and suddenly Perez went from a few thousand monthly listeners to millions. The song charted in multiple countries. It ended up on those Spotify editorial playlists that actually mean something happened. She performed it on Jimmy Fallon, which is still apparently how you know you've crossed over.

What's interesting is that Sailor Song isn't an outlier in her catalog. It's very much in line with what she'd been doing: intimate indie pop with queer themes, recorded with enough bedroom sensibility to feel personal but enough production quality to work on actual speakers. Driver and Heather showcase the same approach, songs that feel like voice memos that somehow ended up with proper arrangements.

Her music sits in that post-Clairo, post-Phoebe Bridgers space where women make sad-adjacent indie pop in their rooms, but Perez leans more into her Latinx background and queer identity in ways that give her songs a different texture. There's Spanish woven through some tracks. The melancholy feels specific rather than generic.

She released How to Catch a Falling Knife in early 2024, her proper debut project that collected Sailor Song alongside tracks that showed she could do more than one thing. The production got cleaner. The arrangements got more ambitious. She worked with actual producers instead of just GarageBand, which you can hear.

Now she's in that weird transitional phase where the viral moment has passed but the question is whether there's an actual career underneath. She's touring properly, playing festivals, doing the things artists do when they're trying to convert streams into a sustainable thing. The next release will probably tell us whether Sailor Song was a fluke or whether people actually care about Gigi Perez beyond that one chorus they heard on their phone.

Perez's shows have a basement-show intimacy even when they're bigger. Crowds lean in rather than jump around. People watch her hands on the guitar, remember lyrics they didn't know they knew. The energy is focused and still, which somehow makes it feel more alive.

Known for Heather, Driver, Sailor Moon, Coffee, Mess It Up

See Gigi Perez Live