LOS ANGELES — Gigi Perez never goes more than a minute or two on her debut album without raising the hair on the back of your neck.

A 25-year-old singer and songwriter from the humid sands of South Florida, Perez broke out last year when "Sailor Song," an eerie-sensual emo-folk ballad about longing for a woman who looks like Anne Hathaway, went viral on TikTok. The song, which Perez recorded in her childhood bedroom, topped the U.K. singles chart and inspired covers by Joe Jonas and Tate McRae; today it's been streamed more than 1.4 billion times on Spotify alone.

Yet unlike many viral hitmakers, Perez has proved herself capable of recapturing lightning in a bottle.

Her impressive LP, "At the Beach, in Every Life," showcases the wild beauty of her singing — its crying highs and purring lows — in stark but sturdy songs about love and religion and the grief that descended on Perez when her older sister, Celene, died in 2020 in circumstances she declines to specify.

"Gigi's voice can tear through the atmosphere like a knife," says Hozier, the Irish folk-rock star who recently took Perez on tour as his opening act. He adds that "something of her internal world seems to travel the air with it."

The daughter of Cuban immigrants, Perez started writing songs when she was about 15 and went on to study briefly at Boston's Berklee College of Music; Interscope Records signed her in 2021 but dropped her two years later without having found much success.

After "Sailor Song" exploded, Perez signed to Island, which released "At the Beach, in Every Life" in April. Imran Majid, the label's co-chairman and CEO, calls attention to the fact that the singer produced the album herself. "This is her sound," he says.

Perez, who's scheduled to play the Wiltern on Oct. 21, talked about her music during a recent swing through Los Angeles to perform on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" and to prep for last month's MTV Video Music Awards, where she was nominated for best new artist.

"Been doing lots of styling and all that stuff," she said, nodding toward a rack of clothes in the hallway of an Airbnb in the hills above West Hollywood.

Is that something you enjoy?

I think I've come a long way. I'm somebody that gets very fixated on a piece of clothing — if I find a shirt I like, I wear it every day. Trying new things on is very different. And I grew up crying in dressing rooms. So it's strengthening a certain kind of mental fortitude to be able to do it.

Would you say your look has changed since you were a teenager?

A lot of people in my generation joke that 2017 was our '80s. So I look back at those outfits and it's like — I don't have the vocabulary to explain it. It's the feeling of Julia Jacklin and Mac DeMarco and the Arctic Monkeys.

What's an instant nostalgia bomb that takes you back to being 15?

The Killers' "Hot Fuss." Marina and the Diamonds' "Froot."

I can't quite gauge Marina's place in the pantheon of pop girlies.

She was one of the first queens to me. I have so many memories of driving to the beach with my sisters and my friends that had licenses when I didn't, and I'm just in the back and we're screaming "Electra Heart."

What's your most Floridian song?

"Sugar Water." A lot of it is about the upbringing that I had. When I think of that song, I think about the first house we lived in — I see the backyard and my dad with this insane Halloween mask that he had that was like an old man with a cigar. I didn't see the throughline of the album until I had probably five songs, and then I saw this water theme that I kept going back to. I think it was missing Florida and where that met with my grief. There's the families that go to the beach and the families that hike and the families that go skiing. For us, the water was right there, and it was free.

What's the most Floridian song not by you?

Hmm.

Something by Mr. 305?

Oh, could be — represent. In high school, I used to tell people Pitbull was my cousin. Pretty much all the Cubans, we were like, "Pitbull's our cousin."

Are you up on the stomp-clap discourse ?

Like the genre?

Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

You're hitting me with all of them.

When that clip from Edward Sharpe's Tiny Desk Concert went viral — when the guy on Twitter said it was the worst song ever made — I was trying to think about what made the song so horrifying.

First of all, certain platforms are used for different things. Twitter is not for the weak — Twitter hurts feelings and will have you changing towns and ZIP Codes, you know what I mean? So of course that happened on Twitter.

Do you see a connection between stomp-clap and what you do? I hear similarities in the guitar playing, though I think you balance earnestness with a knowing quality I don't get from stomp-clap.

I was absolutely sitting at the square TV with "VH1 Top 20 Countdown" watching Marcus Mumford sing his face off. But my music taste was so wide — I grew up listening to reggaeton and Broadway and Christian 2000s pop and Pierce the Veil and Ariana Grande. It was all over the place.

What Christian 2000s pop should I go back to that I might have missed?

I don't know if you should go back, but there's this thing going around [online] right now — Life as a Sheltered Christian Kid of the 2000s — with all the songs.

Does that phrase accurately describe you?

For seven years of my life, I was just like: La la la, Easter on Sunday, the pink pretty dress. Then we started going to this American church, and that's all I really knew from that point until I stopped going to church when I was 17.

In "Sailor Song," you sing, "I don't believe in God." How would you describe the experience of coming to that conclusion?

It's like "The Truman Show." It's not something that just happens like [snaps]. It takes years and years of slowly letting go of different concepts and beliefs — I was falling down Reddit holes and watching Rhett & Link deconstruction videos. Then you wake up one day and you don't recognize the world you live in.

Is there a world where you find your way back to religion?

I don't know. I've been talking with my therapist about the concept of free will and creation, but I just find so many flaws in it. And I don't think flaws are encouraged — the Christian response is always: That's a question I'll ask God when I get to heaven. They're willing to accept that their creator is an omnipotent being that's there with the answers that we don't need to know for our safety or for whatever divine reason. And they have peace in that. I can't do that.

I also think, in the greater context of today and Christian nationalism, there's just so many aspects of Christianity being used in a political context to shield so much hatred and oppression. I remember watching [President Trump's] inauguration, and it was so painful to watch people talk about Jesus in a way that was so far from my upbringing. There's so much regression in the name of God. It's seriously baffling.

It's interesting that two of the year's biggest hits — "Sailor Song" and Alex Warren's "Ordinary" — use religious imagery to talk about a sexual connection.

The first things you're taught will always stick with you, no matter how deep down they are in there. Your brain is a hard drive. But yeah — when I graduated high school, I wasn't thinking about that stuff. I was thinking about college. I was thinking about girls. I was thinking about having a good time.

Why did you decide to thread voicemail messages from your sister throughout the album?

I wanted her to be a part of it. She was an opera singer — one of the greatest singers I've ever heard in my life. She knew that I wanted to be a singer, and I just stumbled into her path.

The unusualness of your voice — were you comfortable with it right away, or did you have to come to the understanding that it was an asset for an artist?

When I first started singing as a kid, Celene — she was such a Disney kid — she would always have me sing the boy parts in all of the duets. I would be Aladdin in "A Whole New World," and I leaned into it. My voice went through puberty around 14 to 15 — that was the first time I felt the tone that you hear in my voice today. The cursive singing got me in 2016 like it got everybody. If you say it didn't, you're lying. But I grew out of it. I'm interested to see what I'll think about my voice 10 years from now.

Do you think of voices in terms of a traditional gender binary?

I've never broken it down that way. The singers I grew up listening to were all different kinds — Adele, Jeff Buckley, Brandon Flowers. Maybe end of high school it started feeling a little bit ambiguous, and I was trying to understand that. Now I just let it be what it is.

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