Girlfriend Material

Life, as Ronan Keating famously once sang, is a rollercoaster – you’ve just got to ride it. Over the last 12 months, Lauran Hibberd been strapped into a
journey resembling hurtling along a loop-the-looping track, being thrown up to dizzying highs before plummeting to life-changing lows and back
again.
In August 2022, as her hook-filled triumph of a debut album ‘Garageband Superstar’ was soaring into the UK Top 40, she was grieving for her father,
who’d died in the weeks ahead of the release. “A lot of stuff happened to me around that time – I lost my dad, I went through my first big break-up, I
was living on my own for the first time,” she reflects now. It would have made sense if this intense period of grief, change and adaptation had left the
26-year-old needing to hit pause and focus on something other than music for a moment.