New Music Friday: When it's time to put Andrew WK at the top of the playlist it's time to put Andrew WK at the top of the playlist hard

Notes on this week's releases:

• Sometimes when we listen to Andrew WK we think "hold on this sort of music is abso­lutely brilliant" so then we go and listen to some other stuff in a similar vein and it's always an awful fucking racket. Literally always. Where are they keeping all the good sort-of-metal? Is it in a secret place? Or is there really nothing else like this? And do you think proper rock people feel this way about pop music? Do you think they hear something pop that somehow lines up with qualities they enjoy in their day-to-day listening, or they hear the best of the absolute best — like, they hear a Robyn single — and they go "maybe I'll give pop another try!", but then they end up listening to Up by Olly Murs and Demi Lovato and then that's it for another three years? And then after a while they'll hear Bad Romance or something and they'll give the old pop thing another go, but the first thing they hear is 'The Vamps and Matoma'?
• CHVRCHES miss out on their second Song Of The Week in a row due to, once again, betraying the most holy tenet of New Music Friday.
• Tracey Thorn's entire album is fantastic but the Shura 'collab' we've selected for this week's playlist is just absurdly amazing.
• The Alma EP is worth a listen. It's nothing extraordin­ary, much as we and it seems everyone else would like it to be, but there are some good moments.
• Gorgon City have released what is, to all intents and purposes, a novelty single. (It's about 65% brilliant.)
• MNEK's new single is really inter­est­ing, partly because it totally changes pace halfway through and becomes abso­lutely tre­mend­ous, and partly because having appar­ently (?) jet­tisoned ideas of having a hit single he's freed himself cre­at­ively to make something really unusual which in turn stands out from almost everything else out there, which IN TURN might actually stand a chance of being a hit. Whatever a hit is these days. Why can't it be like the olden days when iPods were made out of wood and New Music Friday involved having to walk three miles in order to listen to someone singing on a hill?
• As you'd expect the Jack White song, which sounds like The Darkness, is hilarious.

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