"Cheerleader" is a song recorded by Jamaican singer Omi. The track was written and produced by OMI and Clifton Dillon, Mark Bradford, and Ryan Dillon. OMI first began developing the song in 2008, when he created its melody. It was refined over several years alongside famed Jamaican producer Clifton Dillon. It was first recorded with veteran session musicians Sly and Robbie and Dean Fraser. Released as a single on independent label Oufah, the song saw success in Jamaica, where it topped the charts, and also attracted airplay in Hawaii and Dubai. Ultra contacted two disc jockeys to produce remixed versions of the original song. The label and song's producers preferred one remix, produced by a young German DJ, Felix Jaehn, that eschewed much of the song's original instrumentation for a tropical-flavored deep house rendition, prominently featuring a trumpet, a conga beat, and piano. A remix extended play was released in May 2014 by Ultra, which began to first see commercial success that fall.

"Cheerleader" became a massive global success in 2015, when it reached number one in 20 countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Mexico, Ireland, Sweden and Germany.

OMI—the stage name of Omar Samuel Pasley—was born in the parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. He grew up with a love of American hip hop, but grew more interested in melody after listening to singers like John Legend, Nat King Cole, and Sam Cooke. He first developed "Cheerleader" in 2008, when he woke up humming its melody. "It was like a little Jamaican nursery rhyme, like ‘one, two, buckle my shoe,’ that kind of thing—‘ring game’ is what we’d call it. The rest of the song just fell into place like a jigsaw puzzle," he later recalled. The following year, he was discovered by producer Clifton "Specialist" Dillon, an influential figure in the Jamaican music industry, who subsequently became his manager and collaborator. He originally wrote only two verses for the song, imagining it as an interlude for an album. Dillon convinced him to create a third verse, and the song began to take shape. Prolific Jamaican rhythm section Sly and Robbie and veteran saxophonist Dean Fraser contributed to the original recording, which was first issued in 2011 on Oufah, an independent label in Kingston.

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