Five years after the sudden loss of her sister, musician Gigi Perez is still learning to navigate her grief.
“It’s taken me years,” Perez, 25, told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview before her Weekend 1 performance at the 2025 Austin City Limits music festival. “And I always will be processing it, and grief shows up in different ways as I continue throughout life. But I think it took a long time to really … understand what I was feeling, because it was just such an overload of trauma.”
Following Celene’s unexpected death in 2020, Perez channeled her emotions into her music, writing a song named in her sister’s honor which soon went viral. “I think words are one side of it,” she told Us, “but then it’s also, like, the way I hear music and my musical taste and palette has changed within five years from when I lost my sister to today. And so the process [of healing] feels painfully slow.”
Perez’s success on social media led to her signing her first recording contract. Her debut EP, How to Catch a Falling Knife, was released in 2023. Earlier this year, she dropped the gripping album At the Beach, in Every Life, which features fan-favorite hits like “Sailor Song” and “Sugar Water.”
Working on the record was “super cathartic,” Perez told Us. “I think about the album and think about how much I needed to marinate. When I wrote those songs — when I wrote ‘Sugar Water,’ when I wrote ‘At the Beach, in Every Life,’ when I wrote ‘Crown’ — [I think about] how much it meant to me to be able to get it out.”
Along with the loss of her sister, Perez has grappled with the loss of her connection to her faith. Raised in a devout Christian family, Perez’s perspective on religion has since shifted, a journey explored on the “complex” song “Fable.”
“That one, I struggled with it for so long and I never could find the words for it in a way that was satisfying to me. And writing ‘Fable’ just completely hit it on the head,” she said.
Perez dug deeper into her feelings about her faith on “Fable” after a lyric from “Sailor Song” — “I don’t believe in God, but I believe that you’re my savior” — drew criticism from a more conservative group of listeners. Perez told Us she was battling similar “critical voices” in her own head before the discourse began.
“Everyone was like, ‘What the hell?’” she recalled. “And I said [that line] with a sense of remorse, with shame, with anger. There was no sense of proudness of saying I don’t believe in God. [That idea] is absolutely devastating. I want to believe in God. … And I think that it highlighted a lot of my own wounds and my own judgments of myself, the sense of committing blasphemy.”
Despite facing backlash, Perez is glad a conversation was started. “Now I look at it and I’m just so grateful for that experience, and to be [having] this experience, because I know that a lot of people’s relationships with God are much more complicated,” she explained. “And I think to have an honest relationship with God or the concept of it, you have to be able to express all sides of it. People that live in a perfect world where they just never thought twice about it, that’s great for you. But there’s so many people out there that have very complicated relationships with God.”
Perez’s own relationship was made more complicated as she explored her identity as a lesbian. After coming out to her sister as a teenager, Perez is “grateful” she’s found comfort in the broader LGBTQ+ community, especially as an artist.
“It’s so important to me. … And I think more than ever right now, we need each other,” she told Us of making space for queer musicians in the industry. “We need to encourage each other and lift each other up. And so, although I’m one small part of the rainbow with my own specific set of experiences, I definitely look to others to learn from and to be in community with.”
Perez added, “The more representation, the better. I think that we still have a lot of work to do in terms of bringing visibility to others.”
