The Veronicas are Jessica and Lisa Origliasso, the pop-rock Australian singer/songwriter duo. They’ve cut two albums and seven singles, and racked up a few awards, so their popularity is currently rising. And here’s all the fascinating trivia there is to know about the Veronicas:

They’re twin sisters, born December 25th, Christmas day, 1984.

Although they were born and raised in Australia, they are the daughters of Italian immigrants.

Their show business career extends not just to singing, but acting as well. They played the characters ‘Sapphire’ (Lisa) and ‘Emerald’ (Jessica) in the 2001 TV series “Cybergirl”.

The Veronicas isn’t even their first group. They were originally members of a group called ‘Teal’, with friends Tracy Woods and R.Viknes. Their only production from this was “Baby It’s Over”, which got them a small amount of initial publicity.

The hit TV show ‘Australian Idol’ hired the Veronicas to compose songs for contestants on the show to try out. One of their songs later appears on contestant winner Casey Donovan’s album “For You”, and another one of their songs appears on the “Say It’s Forever” album by Japanese pop singer ‘Miz’.

The Veronicas – Untouched

The Veronicas have since moved to Los Angeles, where they see a better opportunity for rising pop stars. They’ve since signed with Warner Brothers, who have produced their debut album, “The Secret Life Of…”.

The Veronicas really did get their name from the Archie comic book series originally created by Bob Montana. But there’s a lot more to the name than that. The Archies were actually a fictitious American pop band created by the comic book enterprise of the same name; live recordings were made by an assembly of studio musicians for the animated cartoon series to play. The Veronicas, then, were named in synchronicity with their male pop comic-inspired equivalents. In a cross-promotional deal, they have appeared in the comic book series as characters, in issue #167 of the spin-off series “Veronica”.

Pop music bands aren’t the only genre to adopt the practice of naming themselves after Archie comic strip characters; that distinction is shared with open-source computer software as well. The predecessor to the World Wide Web we know today was the ‘gopher’ protocol, and the chief program to access gopher was called ‘Archie’. Sure enough, other programs to work with the gopher protocol came along that were named ‘Veronica’ and ‘Jughead’. So, I predict that a pop band will eventually come along called “the Jugheads”, just to complete the circle.

The success of the Veronicas album “The Secret Life Of…” was such that it never left the top 40 in the ARIA album charts for the entire year of 2005. Five singles were also released from this album, including “4ever”, “Everything I’m Not”, “When It All Falls Apart”, “Revolution”, and “Leave Me Alone”.

While we’re talking top spots, one of their songs has also set a record: “When It All Falls Apart” from their first album spent 17 weeks in MTV Asia’s Pop-10 chart.

Their second album, “Hook Me Up”, was leaked to the Internet 3 days before it even got released, to the delight of fans searching for the Veronicas’ mp3s.

Their single “When It All Falls Apart” has also been recorded in “Simlish” and became part of the music in the Sims 2 video game, specifically in the Seasons expansion pack. You can’t say you’ve permeated popular culture until you’ve either been part of the Sims or Second Life, it seems.