The 2000s File Feature
Untouched
Song History: "Untouched" by The Veronicas (2008) The Veronicas are Australian twin sisters Jessica and Lisa Origliasso, who had first achieved mainstream su…
01 The Story
Song History: "Untouched" by The Veronicas (2008)
The Veronicas are Australian twin sisters Jessica and Lisa Origliasso, who had first achieved mainstream success in their home country in 2005 before making a calculated attempt to break into the international market. Their debut album The Secret Life of... had established them in Australia and New Zealand and had attracted attention from American record labels, leading to a deal with Sire Records and Warner Bros. Records for international releases. Their sound combined pop-rock with edgier electronic elements, and their twin identity was deployed as a visual and conceptual branding element that distinguished them from the more generic pop acts competing for similar radio real estate.
"Untouched" was written by Jessica Origliasso, Lisa Origliasso, Billy Steinberg, Josh Alexander, and Toby Gad. The songwriting team brought together the sisters' own creative instincts with the expertise of Billy Steinberg, one of the most successful pop songwriters of the previous three decades, whose credits included songs recorded by Madonna, Whitney Houston, and Cyndi Lauper. Josh Alexander and Toby Gad were also established hitmakers with strong track records in the pop marketplace. This combination of experienced commercial writers with the sisters' personal voice produced a song that felt simultaneously crafted for radio success and genuinely representative of the artists performing it.
The production of "Untouched" was notably aggressive for a mainstream pop release of the period, featuring dense electronic textures, driving programmed drums, and a wall-of-sound approach that borrowed from rock production aesthetics while remaining within the structural conventions of pop songwriting. The track's energy was relentless from its opening moments, building on a verse-chorus structure but adding a pre-chorus element that raised the song's tension before releasing it into an explosive chorus. The production choices aligned with a broader trend in late-2000s pop toward louder, more compressed, and more energetically intense recordings that could compete on radio formats that had seen increasing competition from electronic dance music and rock-influenced pop.
The song was released as a single in Australia and internationally in 2008 and made its debut on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 13, 2008, entering at a strong position of number 62. Its chart trajectory was impressive: climbing from 54 to 40 to 35 to 29 over the following weeks, demonstrating consistent momentum throughout the holiday season and into the new year. By February 7, 2009, "Untouched" had reached its peak position of number 17, making it the highest-charting single in The Veronicas' American career and one of the most successful Australian pop singles to cross over to the United States market in recent years. The song spent 20 weeks on the Hot 100 in total.
The song was a significant international hit beyond the United States as well, reaching the top ten in multiple countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, and several European territories. In Australia, the sisters' home market, the song performed even better, reaching high chart positions and receiving substantial radio and television support. This multi-territory commercial success confirmed The Veronicas' potential as global pop artists and validated the international marketing strategy that had been built around their crossover attempt.
The music video for "Untouched" featured the sisters in dramatic, visually striking imagery consistent with the song's intense sonic energy, and received strong rotation on MTV, MTV2, and FUSE in the United States as well as on equivalent video channels in other markets. The video's aesthetic, which drew on both pop and rock visual traditions, reinforced the genre-blending character of the music itself and helped establish a visual identity for The Veronicas in markets where audiences were encountering them for the first time.
The success of "Untouched" represented the high-water mark of The Veronicas' American commercial achievement, giving them a genuine hit on the mainstream pop chart and demonstrating that Australian pop acts could compete at a high level in the most competitive music market in the world. The song appeared on their second album Hook Me Up, which was also released internationally through Sire Records, and it remains the recording most strongly associated with their name in the global marketplace.
02 Song Meaning
Meaning and Themes: "Untouched" by The Veronicas
"Untouched" explores the overwhelming, almost physical intensity of romantic longing, describing a state of desire so acute that physical separation from the object of that desire is experienced as something close to torment. The song's central emotion is not gentle affection but urgent, consuming need, a quality of wanting that overtakes rational thought and manifests as physical sensation. This intensity of feeling is the primary subject of the track, and the sonic approach mirrors the emotional content, delivering the lyrical declarations through an arrangement of equal intensity and density.
The word "untouched" in the title and throughout the song carries a double meaning. It refers simultaneously to the narrator's physical state of being apart from the desired person, literally not being touched by them, and to a more metaphorical sense of incompleteness: the feeling that without the presence of this particular person, something essential is missing, that the narrator exists in an unrealized state. This sense of incompleteness in absence gives the song its particular emotional register, framing romantic connection not as a pleasant addition to an otherwise complete existence but as something closer to a necessity.
The lyrical framing positions the song within a tradition of pop and rock songs that treat romantic intensity with a kind of hyperbolic, extreme language that matches the subjective experience of infatuation. The exaggerated vocabulary of desire, the suggestion that separation is physically unbearable, reflects the genuine phenomenology of intense romantic feeling, particularly the early stages of romantic attachment when the neurological and emotional effects of attraction are most pronounced. The song takes this subjective experience seriously rather than moderating it to a more reasonable register, and this willingness to embrace emotional extremity was a significant element of its appeal.
The production reinforces the thematic content with remarkable consistency. The song's relentlessly driven sonic energy, its compressed, loud production and refusal to offer quiet moments of reflection, creates an aural equivalent to the state of obsessive preoccupation being described. There is no sonic space in the track for calm or distance, just as there is no emotional space for detachment in the narrator's experience. This integration of production and thematic content gives "Untouched" a coherence that elevates it above songs where the emotional subject and the sonic delivery exist in less precise alignment.
As a recording by twin sisters, the song also carries an implicit dimension related to intimate companionship and shared experience. The blending of Jessica and Lisa Origliasso's voices in the performance creates a vocal texture that mirrors the lyrical theme of connection and merging, with the individual voices sometimes indistinguishable from each other, suggesting a kind of ideal togetherness that parallels the romantic union being described in the lyrics.
Culturally, "Untouched" was received as an example of a pop-rock track that treated female desire with the same directness and intensity that male-voiced rock songs had long claimed as their prerogative. The unapologetic foregrounding of female romantic desire as overwhelming and urgent, without softening or apologizing for its intensity, was a component of the song's reception that resonated with audiences who appreciated seeing this emotional experience given the full sonic treatment it deserved rather than being modulated into something more conventionally demure.
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