I t was the last day of Pride Month in 2024, and Gigi Perez was going through it. Her label at the time, Interscope, had just dropped her; she was living at home, trying to get back on her feet, and she was still grieving her sister Celene, who died four years earlier. Then, as she sat at a friend’s bar at closing time, she got an alert on her phone. Her idol, Hayley Kiyoko, had followed her on Instagram.

“I jumped out of my chair,” Perez, 26, says now. “Like, totally freaked out. I followed her back immediately and sent her a message. Something along the lines of ‘Hey, you’ve impacted me so greatly.’” Kiyoko responded right back with a message of her own, telling Perez how much she loved “Kill for You,” a deep cut off Perez’s debut EP, How to Catch a Falling Knife. Perez was gobsmacked — not only did the woman she’d looked up to since she was 15 listen to her music, she was a fan.

“I was like, ‘Things are turning in my favor,’” Perez says. “At this point, I’m living at home, I’m learning how to record and produce. I found a lot of wonder in that time, that you can be going through a really great time and also a really bad time at the same time. It’s very hard to accept. Hayley following me was like this ray of light.” A month later, Perez dropped “Sailor Song,” an introspective track about grappling with faith, and her career exploded. The song was eventually streamed nearly 2 billion times on Spotify, and she got a new deal with Island Records for At the Beach, in Every Life, a 2025 album that she dedicated to her late sister.

“Gigi and I have a lot in common, but what stands out most is that we’ve both created music out of a place of necessity,” Kiyoko tells Rolling Stone. “I remember listening to At the Beach, in Every Life for the first time in the car, my eyes welling up with tears, this very specific feeling washing over me that struck me to my core. She processes the deepest emotion through her voice in a way I find really rare.”

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This spring, Perez reunited with Kiyoko onstage at Coachella, where they sang Kiyoko’s 2015 song “Girls Like Girls,” a pivotal track from Perez’s youth. “Hayley coming out with ‘Girls Like Girls’ was literally an earthquake,” she says. “She truly is a pioneer of queer music, of gay music, of lesbian music; she didn’t have a trampoline to fall back on. That was her truth. I feel like before that, I didn’t even see a future that I could accept myself, let alone ever have the fucking honor of singing ‘Girls Like Girls’ with her.”

A CLOSETED TEEN FROM FLORIDA who grew up Christian, Perez felt isolated and scared back then, and Kiyoko was a balm. “I don’t think even gay marriage had been legalized when ‘Girls Like Girls’ came out,” she says. (In fact, the single was released the same week as the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Obergefell v. Hodges decision.) Around that same time, she recalls being terrified to read about the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. “I had a wave of emotions. Fear. The feeling that people are out to get you.”

Perez found solace in a group chat of similarly closeted online friends she’d met on Tumblr. “I look back to those times when we were talking to each other late at night when we should be sleeping, like, sending pictures of Selena Gomez to each other,” she says. “Girls Like Girls” was a hot topic of conversation — an ode to stealing a girl from a guy, with a music video featuring teen stars ­Stefanie Scott and Kelsey Asbille. The video went viral, racking up more than 100 million views. It seemed impossible for such a thing to exist to a girl who cowered in church pews, worrying for her immortal soul because she had a crush on a Disney star. 

“I was living so much music — always lost in my headphones,” Perez says. “But I didn’t have any gay perspectives. I could relate to the unrequited love, but never who they were speaking about, you know? It makes you feel alone. And then Hayley came out with ‘Girls Like Girls.’” 

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So naturally, Perez was blown away when she heard recently that the song that meant so much to her was being adapted into a movie. Kiyoko co-wrote and directed the film version of Girls Like Girls, out June 19, and asked Perez to collaborate on a song for the soundtrack. Of course, she agreed. “I remember when she asked me if I’d be down to write something — I was like, ‘You kidding me? Absolutely,’” Perez says. “After we finished the song, we were so happy that we allowed the song to take the course that it needed to take. Collaboration, other people’s perspective, stretches a different part of me.”

The resulting track is called “Collide” — a woozy song brimming with longing and bittersweet romance, co-produced by Yves Rothman. It’s already connecting with fans in a big way: “This song collab implanted a nuclear explosion in my ribs and I ascended to heaven, never to return again. Thank you, o lesbian goddesses,” went one characteristic comment on Reddit. The full soundtrack, out June 12, also features Young Miko, Chelsea Cutler, Joy Oladokun, Snow Wife, August Ponthier, and Tegan and Sara. 

That’s just one highlight of what’s shaping up to be a big summer for Perez. Starting in mid-June, she’ll be playing stadiums across North America as an opening act for Noah Kahan. She’s also joining the Vermont singer-­songwriter (and our June 2026 cover star) in the lineup for Rolling Stone’s first Stateside Festival in Kingston, New York, on July 4.

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Perez thinks that Girls Like Girls is especially important in a climate of attacks on trans rights and freedom of speech in America. “When I was 15, it was very hard for me to imagine that life would ever get better,” she says. “I feel like acknowledging our roots and where we’ve come from is so important. We cannot take this for granted — these rights that we have. We have to remember who fought for us to get us to this place.”

As for those online friends who supported her late into the night, talking about Kiyoko’s music and their secret crushes, Perez still  thinks about them sometimes. “I have this one group chat on WhatsApp,” she says. “We grew up together. We don’t speak as much anymore, but we’re always going to be there for each other.” When she played Coachella this year, she checked her messages on the app and saw that one of those old friends had posted a livestream of her performance to the group chat. “I texted them right after: ‘Thank you guys for getting me through.’”