Brand New Vinyl Static and Pops

I’m going to second dogberry’s 1st post.  
Lots of stuff to consider here.  
Unfortunately, lots of brand new vinyl has a dismayingly many tick-and-pop.  
Cleaning vinyl is very important.  
I don’t wish to make it all seem so tedious, but another thing to consider is that improperly cleaning a vinyl record will make it sound muffled.  
If a lesser solution is used and/or not allowed enough time to properly suspend the gunk in the grooves and then “applied” manually with some type of cloth, that process just mashes the gunk into the grooves even deeper.  
The best way is a vacuum cleaning machine with good cleaning fluid (I recommend Audio Intelligent solutions). Unfortunately this can be necessary (if not always necessary depending on how diligent one wants to be) with brand new vinyl.  
Apologies if you already knew this and were already cleaning vinyl with good solution and a good vacuum cleaning machine.
Ortofon Blue is a good cartridge. You’re on the right track by reinstalling the Red to see if such problems persist there as well.  
Undertaking the imperative processes of cartridge/tonearm/turntable alignment - VTF (that’s real easy), overhang, azimuth, SRA (aka VTA - one adjusts the height of the tonearm base to optimize the angle at which the stylus contacts the vinyl in the vertical plane) and anti-skate, as well as making sure the turntable platter is perfectly level on 3 different “points of an invisible triangle” on the platter with a bubble level and making sure the turntable rack is as protected from undesirable resonances as possible (a rack mounted to wall studs is ideal) - is, again, imperative when assessing the fidelity of a vinyl setup in every case.  
Also, trying a good standalone phono stage/preamp in lieu of what you referred to as “an old Denon receiver” (assuming you are using the phono input on said receiver) is a good idea.