Lauren Bennett, G.R.L. Singer and Party Rock Anthem Star, Dies at 37

The pop world lost another voice this week. Lauren Bennett, the former G.R.L. member and featured artist on LMFAO’s massive hit“Party Rock Anthem,”has died at 37. The news landed on Monday, July 6, when her bandmates Emmalyn Estrada, Natasha Slayton, and Paula van Oppen shared a joint statement on Instagram, describing Bennett as someone whose“beautiful spirit touched so many lives.”

Bennett’s career arc tells a story that many in the industry know too well: a moment of breakthrough followed by the unpredictable aftermath of fame. When G.R.L. formed in 2012, the five-member group seemed poised for something big. Within a year, they scored a legitimate hit with“Vacation”on the Smurfs 2 soundtrack and collaborated with Pitbull on“Wild Wild Love.”But momentum in pop music is fragile. The group disbanded in the mid-2010s after facing internal upheaval, including the tragic death of bandmate Simone Battle in September 2024 at age 25, which was later ruled a suicide.

Before G.R.L., Bennett had already tasted chart success. Her feature on“Party Rock Anthem”became her first number-one song—the kind of cultural moment that should have opened doors everywhere. Yet the industry doesn’t always work that way. After the group fell apart, Bennett pivoted to a solo career, releasing“Hurricane”in 2016. In sharing that song with the world, she opened up about its deeply personal origins: watching her mother struggle with mental health issues and losing a friend to suicide. The track wasn’t just music; it was testimony.

What makes Bennett’s story resonate beyond the usual celebrity death cycle is how she used her platform in the years following tragedy. After Battle’s death, G.R.L. created“Lighthouse”and launched G.R.L. Gives an Hour in partnership with the nonprofit Give an Hour—a campaign dedicated to raising awareness about mental health. She’d lived the pain she was trying to prevent others from experiencing. That’s the opposite of empty celebrity activism; that’s someone trying to turn private suffering into public good.

The official cause of Bennett’s death hasn’t been disclosed. What remains is the statement from her former bandmates—a testament to the bonds forged in those early years of promise and the grief that follows losing someone you created music with. In an era when pop groups cycle through members and dissolve quickly, G.R.L. represented a specific moment in the early 2010s when girl groups still felt like a viable format. They didn’t last, but the mark they left—and the mark Bennett left—deserves to be remembered as more than a footnote in the story of a hit song.