Gigi Perez
photo: popdust · cc by 3.0 ↗Gigi Perez was born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 2000 and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, where she taught herself piano as a teenager and began releasing music in 2018 while still in high school. After a brief major-label deal ended, she built a following by posting spare, confessional songs from her bedroom, breaking through in 2024 when the hushed, hymn-like 'Sailor Song' became a global hit. Her indie-folk and indie-pop, collected on the 2025 debut album 'At the Beach, In Every Life,' trades on intimacy: close-mic'd vocals, plainspoken devotion and grief, and arrangements that swell from near-silence.
Perez has repeatedly called Jeff Buckley her favorite artist of all time, and his imprint is audible in the way she leans on a single voice-and-guitar intimacy that opens up into full-throated release. Like Buckley, she builds a song from a near-whispered, unhurried verse toward a soaring, unguarded vocal peak rather than a conventional pop drop.
listen forPut on Buckley's 'Grace' and follow how the hushed opening tightens and then bursts into that wordless, aching upper-register wail — then hear the same move in 'Sailor Song,' where the restrained verses give way to a swelling, exposed vocal that carries the emotional weight instead of a big production.
Perez has spoken about being a huge Phoebe Bridgers fan and has named her among the contemporary artists she would most want to collaborate with. You can hear it in her plainspoken, diaristic lyric-writing and in a delivery that stays low and conversational while detailing hurt, so the devastation lands quietly rather than being belted.
listen forCue Bridgers' 'Motion Sickness,' with its deadpan, almost casual catalogue of a bad relationship over a spare, steadily building backdrop, then listen to 'Please Be Rude' — Perez uses the same trick of narrating intimacy and want in an understated, close-up voice that lets the plainness of the words do the cutting.
Perez has named Bon Iver among her influences, and critics have likened her more atmospheric tracks to his early work. The kinship is in the texture: layered, reverb-soaked falsetto harmonies and a hushed, cocooned folk atmosphere where the voice is smeared into the arrangement rather than sitting cleanly on top of it.
listen forListen to the blurred, overlapping falsetto layers and warm haze of Bon Iver's 'Flume,' then play 'Sugar Water' — Perez stacks her own voice into a soft, wordless-feeling wash and lets the melody drift inside the reverb, chasing the same intimate, weather-worn glow.