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Photo: Deanie Chen

Steely-feely yet sweet vocals, sticky heart-wrenching lyrics, and a past riddled with traumas ripe for songs, gigi almost feels like an artist built from a lab. But even after a brief listen, it's hard not to be overwhelmed by her all too human journey, a concentric bundle of emotions and rue to life narratives, growing in temperature and intensity deeper and deep with each repeated listen.

Currently hailing from Brooklyn, this talented songstress is wrapping up a supporting tour with d4vd, wowing audiences, including this writer, with her vocal prowess and stage presence, beguiling you into believing she’d been doing this for some time. The reality is she is nascent in experience but not so in ability, slipstreaming behind a TikTok viral track, “Sometimes (Backwood),” transforming that chance moment into streaming numbers, a record deal, and now a debut EP—How To Catch a Falling Knife, set to release April 28, and heralded by the melancholic single, "Sally."

Growing up in a music-obsessed Floridian-Cuban household, aided by an older sister’s taste in The Killers and Lana Del Rey, gigi discovered songwriting and delved into music expression with youthful passion. Buffeted behind traumatic events, plunged into despair by the loss of her older sibling, it's impossible not to palpably feel the contagion of that loss in everything gigi writes, sings, and sweats out in performance.

In "Sally," produced by Jake Weinberg, that persistence, the willpower of wanting a journey to continue, is explicitly cloaked in the tonal structure of the song: a languid, sluggish guitar, hesitant drums, and raspy, mournful vocal delivery that sounds well worn in sadness. Of the beautiful singles gigi shares, “'Sally' is the name you can’t say to anyone but yourself because it's been so long. When the person you miss is no longer a person, but a story you repeat to convince yourself it was real and it happened.”

After hours on repeat, this song feels like a shared memory, a bundle of missing faces, deja vu sutures being pulled tight, healing through catharsis. Without question so much more is to come from gigi, and while it’s hard to wait for her upcoming EP, it’s even harder to imagine not having more of this generational talent to pour over.  

Watch the "Sally" video below: