Gigi Perez Releases Debut Album "At the Beach, in Every Life"
by Kelsey Barlow | April 30th, 2025
On April 25th, 2025, Gigi Perez released her debut full-length album, At The Beach, In Every Life. This album features singles she has released over the past year, including her viral hit Sailor Song, that released after gaining popularity on TikTok in July of 2024. Gigi recently wrapped up the European portion of her first headline tour and is in the middle of the US leg. This summer, she will be the opening act on Hozier’s 2025 Unreal Unearth Tour.
I have been a fan of Gigi’s music since early 2024, so the release of this album was highly anticipated for me, and I can report that it definitely didn’t disappoint. Through a collection of hard-hitting acoustic songs, Perez explores themes of religion, trauma, grief, and queerness. The album kicks off with her most popular single “Sailor Song,” which explores the emotions and longing in a relationship between two women. As a queer woman myself, I love how Gigi writes about love. It’s so much more than attraction. The soulful connections Gigi writes about make for some of the most relatable and beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard.
Like “Sailor Song,” track 5 (“Nothing, Absolutely”) and track 10 (“Please Be Rude”) also explore queer love gently and romantically. “Nothing, Absolutely” is a dreamy acoustic song about finding a connection with someone that renews your spirit to the point where being away from that person is difficult. Gigi sings, “You brought back my spark. Oh, sleeping is hard. Sleeping is hard without you.” I love how she emphasizes how a romantic connection can change how you operate in life regarding wants and desires. “Please Be Rude” is a song that has been near and dear to my heart ever since it was released as a single in 2024. This song has a sense of yearning and desperation that makes it the perfect love song. Combining sexuality with religious themes, Gigi sings, “How else can it be proven to you that I’m devout? I spill right out.” The way Gigi seamlessly connects religion to other topics is one of my favorite recurring themes in this album.
Perez’s relationship with religion is one of the most prevalent subjects on this album, highlighting Gigi’s upbringing along with the questions and struggles she faces with God now. One of my favorite songs that touches on this is “Fable,” which talks about the loss of her older sister Celene, and Gigi’s relationship with God within that experience. The song's lyrics that impacted me most are “Divinity says, ‘Destiny can’t be earned or returned’. I feel when I question, my skin starts to burn. Why does my skin start to burn?” For me, growing up in the church and disconnecting from that belief system later in life, these lyrics perfectly capture what it’s like to start questioning the religion you were raised in, especially in the face of tragedy.
Through grief, deconstructing, and love, Gigi flawlessly captures what it means to grow up as a queer person and experience major loss at a young age. From longing for your childhood in Sugar Water, honoring a loved one in Survivor’s Guilt, and encapsulating every emotion highlighted in the previous songs in the title track At The Beach, In Every Life, Perez has written a perfect album. When this album was announced, it became my most highly anticipated release of the year, and now that I’ve had time to sit with it, I would say it’s one of my favorite albums of all time. I encourage everyone to go stream At The Beach, In Every Life, wherever you get your music.
