Songfacts®:

• This song was originally recorded by aborted girl band Orchid earlier in the year but the record was never released. When the song was played to Girls Aloud they decided to record it as their debut single. Orchid's voices were retained in the background and they are credited as backing singers.
• Girls Aloud were the female winners of the UK ITV show Popstars: The Rivals, which created a female and a male Pop group to compete against each other for the Christmas #1. This song beat the male winners "One True Voice" to the top of the festive charts by 213,000 sales to 167,000 sales. Girls Aloud have gone on to record many more Top 10 hits while One True Voice's career stalled and within 6 month's they'd broken up.
• This was written and produced by UK production house Xenomania. Xenomania have produced most of Girls Aloud's hits, in addition to songs for The Sugababes, Kylie Minogue, Cher and Steps.
• Disney Channel viewers voted this as the best single of 2002-2003 at the Disney Channel Kids Awards. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Edward Pearce - Ashford, Kent, England, for all above
• "Sound Of The Underground" garnered critical acclaim for its fusion of surf guitar elements with pulsating electronic beats. The song was seen as a fresh and innovative take on pop music, and it helped to launch Girls Aloud as a major force in the British music scene.
  
  However, Girls Aloud's Nicola Roberts was initially anxious about the track's drum and bass sound. "We didn't have drum and bass up north at the time; we just had commercial radio," she wrote in the liner essay for 20th anniversary re-release of the group's debut album, Sound of the Underground. "So I was just very aware that Sound of the Underground sounded different from the pop groups that came before us: Atomic Kitten, Spice Girls, Hear'Say."