I
t was the last day of Pride Month in 2024, and Gigi Perez was going through it. Her label at the time, Interscope, had just dropped her; she was living at home, trying to get back on her feet, and she was still grieving her sister Celene, who died four years earlier. Then, as she sat at a friend’s bar at closing time, she got an alert on her phone. Her idol, Hayley Kiyoko, had followed her on Instagram.
“I jumped out of my chair,” Perez, 26, says now. “Like, totally freaked out. I followed her back immediately and sent her a message. Something along the lines of ‘Hey, you’ve impacted me so greatly.’” Kiyoko responded right back with a message of her own, telling Perez how much she loved “Kill for You,” a deep cut off Perez’s debut EP, How to Catch a Falling Knife. Perez was gobsmacked — not only did the woman she’d looked up to since she was 15 listen to her music, she was a fan.
“I was like, ‘Things are turning in my favor,’” Perez says. “At this point, I’m living at home, I’m learning how to record and produce. I found a lot of wonder in that time, that you can be going through a really great time and also a really bad time at the same time. It’s very hard to accept. Hayley following me was like this ray of light.” A month later, Perez dropped “Sailor Song,” an introspective track about grappling with faith, and her career exploded. The song was eventually streamed nearly 2 billion times on Spotify, and she got a new deal with Island Records for At the Beach, in Every Life, a 2025 album that she dedicated to her late sister.
