Five years after the sudden loss of her sister, musician Gigi Perez is still learning to navigate her grief.

“It’s taken me years,” Perez, 25, told Us Weekly in an exclusive interview before her Weekend 1 performance at the 2025 Austin City Limits music festival. “And I always will be processing it, and grief shows up in different ways as I continue throughout life. But I think it took a long time to really … understand what I was feeling, because it was just such an overload of trauma.”

Following Celene’s unexpected death in 2020, Perez channeled her emotions into her music, writing a song named in her sister’s honor which soon went viral. “I think words are one side of it,” she told Us, “but then it’s also, like, the way I hear music and my musical taste and palette has changed within

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