Lauran Hibberd - Girlfriend Material (0338881) LP Sky Blue Vinyl
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.
Writing, though, became a way for her to deal with and continue processing the things she was going through. As she re-entered sessions in the studio, her second album ‘Girlfriend Material’ “just fell out” of her. “It felt like it needed to happen. I felt so much freer and a bit more capable of writing about certain topics than I did before,” she reasons. “It’s like, for the first album, someone sent me to Spain without me knowing any Spanish, and I’ve been like, ‘I’ll figure it out’. This time, I’ve had a year of learning Spanish, and I can ask for the time.”
1. I Suck At Grieving
2. Jealous
3. Mary
4. 90’s Kid
5. Happy For You
6. Better Than I Was Before
7. Anti Fragile
8. 2nd Prettiest Girl (In The World)
9. Girlfriend Material
10. Pretty Good For A Bad Day (feat: Alex Gaskarth)
11. So Romantic
12. Not The Girl You Hoped
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.
Writing, though, became a way for her to deal with and continue processing the things she was going through. As she re-entered sessions in the studio, her second album ‘Girlfriend Material’ “just fell out” of her. “It felt like it needed to happen. I felt so much freer and a bit more capable of writing about certain topics than I did before,” she reasons. “It’s like, for the first album, someone sent me to Spain without me knowing any Spanish, and I’ve been like, ‘I’ll figure it out’. This time, I’ve had a year of learning Spanish, and I can ask for the time.”
1. I Suck At Grieving
2. Jealous
3. Mary
4. 90’s Kid
5. Happy For You
6. Better Than I Was Before
7. Anti Fragile
8. 2nd Prettiest Girl (In The World)
9. Girlfriend Material
10. Pretty Good For A Bad Day (feat: Alex Gaskarth)
11. So Romantic
12. Not The Girl You Hoped