walking upstream…
Gigi Perez
photo: popdust · cc by 3.0 ↗Gigi Perez
sourcesWikipedia — Gigi Perez (overview, lead only) · Rolling Stone — "Gigi Perez Overcame Her Lowest Moment" (bio, family, grief) · Rolling Stone — "Gigi Perez Felt Alone, But Now the Whole World Is Singing With Her" (bio, Sailor Song) · NME — "The Cover" profile (Twister/Alex G connection, bio) · The Luna Collective — Q&A (Jeff Buckley as favorite artist) · iHeart — "She Is The Voice" (Ariana Grande and Jeff Buckley testimony) · The Singles Jukebox — "Sailor Song" review (Jeff Buckley vocal comparison) · Variety — album review (Jeff Buckley/Thom Yorke vocal comparison) · Atwood Magazine — "Twister" review (Auto-Tune/genre departure) · Billboard — debut album feature (Sugar Water recording story) · Unclear Magazine — interview (Alex G cover, Ariana Grande as early inspiration)
Gigi Perez grew up in a Cuban immigrant, church-going household in South Florida, taught herself piano at 15 after not making the soccer team, and briefly attended Berklee College of Music before her older sister Celene's death in 2020 pulled her out of school. She turned the grief into a song, posted it to TikTok, and found an audience she hadn't planned for. A major-label deal came and went; she taught herself to record and produce alone in her room, and in 2024 the self-made 'Sailor Song' became a global, sapphic hit that reached Number One in the UK. Her 2025 debut album, 'At The Beach, In Every Life,' turns that same close-mic'd, unhurried intimacy toward faith, sexuality, and the sister she keeps writing back to. "I'm a fan of music before I'm a songwriter," she told NME — and the record plays like proof.
the sound in question
2024
Sailor SongGigi Perez
walk the tributaries ↓
Alex G2010s · Indie rock / Folk rock / Lo-fi
In 2019, a love interest at Berklee College of Music put Perez onto Alex G, and she has described the encounter almost like a conversion. "Once I heard DSU, it was over," she told Elite Daily, "and then I found House of Sugar... Hearing Alex G's perspective on music led me to my own." She kept his warped tunings at arm's length and simplified her own chords, but the permission to bend a song out of shape stuck — years later she covered his 'Harvey' on tour and, per NME, built 'Twister,' the one hard genre swerve on her debut album, directly out of his influence.
listen: upstream & heresource: Elite Daily — "Early Influences" (Alex G and Ariana Grande testimony) ↗
2019
SportstarAlex G
2025
TwisterGigi Perez
listen forAlex G's 'Sportstar' is the moment on 'House of Sugar' where his lo-fi indie-rock catalogue suddenly lets Auto-Tune and synths take over the vocal. Listen for that same left turn on 'Twister' — the rest of Perez's album is voice and acoustic guitar, then her own voice pitches into Auto-Tune over a synth pulse and drum machine, a hyper-pop chorus dropped into a folk record the way Alex G dropped one into his.
Jeff Buckley1990s · Alternative rock / Folk rock / Blues
Ask Perez for her favorite artist of all time and the answer doesn't change: "My favorite artist of all time is Jeff Buckley. I love him a lot," she told The Luna Collective, one of at least three interviews where his name comes first. Critics hear it before she says a word — Variety's review of her debut album called her voice a deep alto that "recalls Jeff Buckley and Radiohead's Thom Yorke when she swoops up into higher registers," and The Singles Jukebox's review of 'Sailor Song' specifically called her contralto "obviously indebted to Jeff Buckley."
listen: upstream & heresource: Unpublished — "Getting Personal With Gigi Perez" (Alex G, Jeff Buckley, Ariana Grande testimony) ↗
1994
GraceJeff Buckley
2024
Sailor SongGigi Perez
listen forBuckley's 'Grace' spends its verses hushed and close before the chorus throws his voice wide open into an unguarded, high, sustained cry — the same architecture built the opposite way on 'Sailor Song,' where Perez's low, husky verses give way to a soaring, exposed vocal peak that carries the entire song's emotional weight instead of a bigger arrangement doing it for her.
Ariana Grande2010s · Pop / R&B / Dance-pop
Perez was twelve when she decided Ariana Grande, then still a Nickelodeon actor on 'Victorious,' was going to be the biggest pop star in the world, and she never really let go of the fandom. "It all started with watching Victorious, and thinking, 'This girl has pipes,'" she told Elite Daily. She's careful about the shape of the debt, though: "She's always been that somebody that I've looked up to — less so in the sense that you listen to my music and think of her, but her vocal arrangements scratch an itch in my brain," a distinction she repeated almost word for word to iHeart's 'She Is The Voice.'
listen: upstream & heresource: Elite Daily — "Early Influences" (Alex G and Ariana Grande testimony) ↗
2016
into youAriana Grande
2025
Sugar WaterGigi Perez
listen forThis is the least audible of Perez's influences by her own account, so listen narrowly: it's about vocal stacking, not genre. 'into you' builds its bridge out of Grande's harmonies piling on top of each other into a dense, breathy wall; 'Sugar Water,' recorded alone two days before Perez turned in her album, uses the same trick in miniature, multi-tracking her own voice into a soft harmonic haze rather than reaching for a pop chorus.