A week before her death, Lauren Bennett spoke to her former Paradiso Girls bandmate Aria Crescendo. It was an ordinary conversation, the kind friends have, and neither could have known it would be their last. “We spoke a week before it all happened and I could not imagine that would be the last time I would be able to talk to you,” Crescendo wrote on Instagram after the news broke. On 6 July, the pop group G.R.L. announced that Bennett had died on 29 May in Meopham, Kent, at the age of 36. The statement, signed by her three former bandmates, spoke of broken hearts and a beautiful spirit that had touched many lives. No cause of death was given, but coroner records confirm an inquest is scheduled for October.

Bennett’s path to global recognition began not in a recording studio but on a television stage. As a teenager from the Kent village of Meopham, she reached the final twelve of the British edition of The X Factor in 2006. That exposure led to an audition for Paradiso Girls, a European spin-off of the Pussycat Dolls created by choreographer Robin Antin. The group’s 2009 single “Patron Tequila”, featuring Lil Jon and Eve, climbed to number three on the US dance club chart, but the project dissolved a year later. Then, in 2011, Bennett lent her voice to a track that would become inescapable: LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem”. The song spent six weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and was later ranked by the magazine as the fifth most successful single of all time. Its music video, in which Bennett appears alongside the duo, has accumulated more than 2.5 billion views on YouTube.

In 2014, Antin recruited Bennett again, this time for G.R.L., a reboot of the Pussycat Dolls formula. The quintet’s single “Ugly Heart” and a feature on Pitbull’s “Wild Wild Love” brought them chart success, but the group unravelled the following year after member Simone Battle died by suicide. Bennett continued to record, contributing to film soundtracks and releasing solo material, including the 2016 track “Hurricane”, which she said addressed her mother’s and a friend’s mental health struggles. She later settled into family life with her partner, the actor Kenny Wormald, and their daughter, Harlow, born in 2019.

Viewed from London, the silence surrounding the circumstances of Bennett’s death has been filled, in part, by her father. Richard Bennett posted a statement expressing “deep disappointment” with the National Health Service, which he said “failed to treat her appropriately” after she experienced a severe reaction to a prescribed medication months before her death. He stressed that the family had no suspicions about the death itself, only a sense that the system had let her down. In the United States, where Bennett’s voice remains a fixture of dance floors and throwback playlists, tributes poured in from collaborators and fans. The producer Josh Stevens recalled a friendship that spanned wild tours and the strange coincidence of their children being born on the same day. Across Latin America, Spanish-language outlets led with the image of a young woman who, for a fleeting moment in a music video, raised her hands and helped soundtrack a generation’s parties. That image — Bennett in the “Party Rock Anthem” clip, caught between the duo’s zebra-print antics, her voice woven into a chorus that still echoes in clubs and stadiums — is now a memorial of its own.