There is not a preferred backend that has been officially prescribed by the Angular team. You could certainly use Laravel if you'd like.
Keep in mind that you might not even need a backend server. Angular behaves as a single page application, so all of the routing and view rendering is handled on the frontend (same is true for React, Vue, etc.). You won't need to create any MVC controllers in Laravel. You can simply host the files that the Angular CLI or Webpack produces on a static file server like S3 and you're done.
If you need to have a REST API server to access a database or to do authentication, that's when you might need a backend server. However, then there are easier options to do those things as well. Firebase, a hosted backend provided by Google, allows you to do authentication and interact with a database without maintaining your own server. There are official libraries provided for Angular. A service like Auth0 provides cloud-based authentication. Both of these services have free tiers as well. Serverless functions, like AWS Lambdas or GCP Cloud Functions, are also a convenient method of exposing APIs without maintaining a backend server (these, however, are not necessarily free). I recently found this framework that I really like for developing serverless functions: Serverless.
If you do still end up choosing to make your own backend server, Laravel will do the job. However, I would recommend using a Node backend. Your JavaScript skills will carry over nicely to Node. And if you eventually do something like server-side rendering with Angular Universal, that will need to run under Node. Express is the de facto suggestion for Node backends. I also very much like NestJS, which is a TypeScript-enabled backend written on top of Express. It is heavily inspired by Angular so many of the concepts will feel familiar.