Gigi Perez is a 25-year-old Cuban-American singer-songwriter who specializes in the kind of yearning, heartspilling songs that have passionate fans singing along tearfully at her shows (we’ve seen it happen), and a voice that perfectly suits them: A striking alto that is unexpectedly deep for a female singer but, even more unusually, recalls Jeff Buckley and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke when she swoops up into higher registers.
Her backstory is filled with a succession of tragedies and triumphs: An older sister who passed away early in the pandemic — and whose voicemails are sprinkled throughout this album — followed by a painful breakup, and then a viral hit that resulted in major-label deal, an EP (“How to Catch a Falling Knife”), dates opening for Coldplay and Noah Cyrus… and then being dropped from that major label. She retreated back to her Florida home, regrouped and kept releasing songs, including the queer-themed viral hits “Please Be Rude” and her breakout hit “Sailor Song,” both of which are included here on her debut full-length for Island Records.
It’s not a conventional debut album by any stretch: The songs, written and produced by Perez with one or two collaborators (primarily her friends Noah Weinman and Aidan Hobb), are driven almost entirely by stacked multitracked vocals and massed acoustic guitars, with occasional keyboards or string embellishments and very little percussion. Sometimes the songs ride on arrangements and intensity rather than conventional song structure: For example, “Crown” kind of circles melodically but the delivery and arrangement build and diminish, giving the impression of verse/chorus without really following that formula.
She’s a versatile and powerful singer, capable of singing forcefully or with a hush (“Normalcy”) that starts off intimate and turns anguished. Intentionally or no, the album often recalls Bon Iver’s galvanizing 2007 debut, “For Emma, Forever Ago,” which has similar themes of loss, loneliness and isolation. But Perez also mixes in some lusty lyrics amid the ones about loss and loneliness, especially on “Sailor Song” and “Please Be Rude,” the latter of which lets in some rare rays of optimism around the discovery of a new love.
And she breaks formation musically with the next-to-last song, “Twister,” which starts with a thumping beatbox that is so unlike the rest of the album that it may have listeners at first checking to see if the album has ended and the streaming service is autoplaying a different artist — but instead, it’s a totally different, promising musical lane for her, with an autotuned chorus and lush keyboards and vocal arrangements along with the loping beat.
With that kind of range in songwriting and sound, it seems Gigi Perez is just getting started.
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