Girls Aloud have a new single out. It's called 'Something New' and it's a whizz-bang poppers o'clock femme-fest about mastering the holy grail of all feminist endeavours - control. (Natalia Kills has sealed herself away in her bondage basement, weeping into her handcuffs.) 'Something New' is/was/has been produced by Xenomania, so on the pop spectrum of lamazing to balls-out fandango fantasticality, it's bound to end up somewhere near the top of the list, isn't it?

First off, 'Something New' isn't something new, at least in the grand scheme of pop music. Let's keep that in mind, please - we are talking about pop music, not music as a whole. And in the world of pop music, it's not a sound we've not heard before and the lyrics aren't all that new and innovative either, but whether this hinders your ability to enjoy this song boils down to whether or not you hold innovation and originality in staunchly high regard when considering what makes a certifiably 'good' pop song. And if you find yourself scoffing at the thought of a pop artist not being new and innovative then a great way of solving this is to type out all that you hold dear about innovative pop music, every little detail (with examples of these mystically precious songs), email it to yourself, print it out, fold it in four and write "My pleasure" on it, and then pop it up your bottom.

So yes, 'Something New' is ground re-trodden. So what? What catapults the song into the lofty height it proudly sits at, sneering down at the asthmatic anemia of synth-stabbing lightweights like Calvin Harris and LMFAO and their brand of euro(trash)pop is a number of precautionary measures one can reliably expect to hear in a Xenomania poptastic fanfare, such as how there's no breakdown. Western pop has taken on the recent belief that all club songs need a breakdown, but we have Adele and Ed Sheeran for those times when we feel the need for a good sit-down and a cry, so this logic is bollocks. Hearing every remotely energetic song diluted by a sudden drop-out of sound, followed by a build-up and then, if you're Calvin Harris, a big gun-shot before everything 'goes off' again, just kills momentum and it's sort of like getting ready to cum and then your lover turning into a boiled egg. More than one breakdown in a song is an even more heinous crime and you might as well not be bothering, because who's going to listen to a song where half the time there's nothing happening and to dance like you would at the 'big' parts makes you look like a complete goon?

Songs like 'Gangnam Style' and 'Bad Romance' evade this sort of gentle disappointment, the former because of how adorably stupid and slightly perverse the whole thing is and the latter because if you don't dance to music in Lady GaGaland you could find yourself impaled on a spike of human hair while getting bummed flat by gay Nazis. So when you see Calvin Harris nodding along to a song like 'We'll Be Coming Back' or 'You Used To Hold Me' with a stern moodface put on, taking it all relatively seriously and having as much fun as listening to paint dry, you begin to wonder why he bothers to fatten out his two-bar, four-note refrains with expensive but cheap-sounding whooshes of air. Quite cleverly, Xenomania have done away with that, and they've added an audible bass injection to the main refrain, meaning that the melody isn't so slight it becomes impossible to define or elaborate on for fear of it being lost amidst any form of singing above featherweight. In fact, that chorus refrain is like watching a sledgehammer being swung at your face in slow-motion, before it shatters you like a mirror.

As well as the above, the song's verses actually fit, and give the impression - unlike so many other Best Of... releases - that the song was actually formed with care, rather than squashing in a few verses after finding a good chorus hook. Just look at the way those verses spring up on you before you even know it. One minute there's a big skyflying chorus and then the next it's dirty and intimate with five femme fatales. The girls could be doing twenty seconds of farting in that time and it'd still be more interesting than pretty robots, The Saturdays. While everyone's obsessed with trying to find reason to invest praise in groups like Little Mix and StooShe for their harmonic seamlessness, it's actually pretty easy to see how on 'Something New' the collective forces of Cheryl, Nadine, Sarah, Nicola and t'other one with the round face actually combine together and work not in unison, but in collaboration, feeding off each other's energy to the point where the lacklustre chorus lyrics can feel reinvigorated. You may have noticed recent efforts from The Saturdays (e.g. - 30 Days (To Love)') where you've got five singers and one voice being heard; 'Something New' doesn't do that - it feels like a group with better harmony than any of the recent girls groups to come crawling out of the bargain bin. The verses naturally, are the best part, wobbling along to a pulsating bassline and staying true to what Girls Aloud are about instead of chasing expiry-dated trends like adding a bit of unnecessary gloom-wobble dub into the little (big) mix (see what I did there?). It's easy to be swamped by influences, but really, 'Something New' is influenced only by Girls Aloud. It doesn't try to look back into the past at a time when handbag house thought itself rather good and try to market it as the latest in chart trends. Nor does it pilfer an underground genre/influence and blusteringly pretend they're the ones who brought it to the mainstream (hey Britney!). What it is, is damn good pop music as pop music.

However - the lyrics do need changing. The reference to "boys" in the song should be changed to "girls". A winking kick up the arse to the **** crop of girl groups we have fostering spots on the radio airwaves. Imagine how much more sense it would make as their first single in over three years and they come out with "Girls you better watch your back/'Cause we're the leaders of the pack/Tell me can you handle that?". Just an observation.

So is it any good? I don't know really. I like some parts and I hate others. Sarah's bit is the best bit and that's not negotiable. Nadine's "Go girls g-g-go go go" is annoying. I've pointed out approximately five things about a song by a group of artists I don't usually like, so if you're one of those people who decides a song's quality on the singer's likability then maybe you don't deserve to listen to music. And more importantly, if need me to tell you which songs you should listen to and why then maybe you should just tear your ears off too. Fool.