Skinny Puppy will embark on a 29-date North American tour early next year dubbed “Shapes for Arms” in support of the band’s current album Weapon, a concept record described as commentary on “the concurrent glorification of the gun culture and simultaneous horror at the devastation guns can cause.”

Earlier this year, U.K.-based label Occultation Recordings took the unusual step of surveying fans of The Wild Swans about what they’d like to see included on deluxe vinyl reissues of the band’s third album, 2011′s The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years, and a 2003 compilation of ’80s radio sessions, demos and rarities,

Tonight’s Slicing Up Eyeballs Music Hour on Strangeways Radio celebrated the best of 1988, featuring music from They Might Be Giants, Talking Heads, Marc Almond, Pixies, The Godfathers, R.E.M., Erasure, The Waterboys, Sonic Youth, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Jane’s Addiction and more.

Morrissey may have bemoaned he had no U.S. publisher for his just-released autobiography — cleverly titled “Autobiography” — but that’s no longer the case. The singer announced today that G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of his U.K. publisher Penguin, will put the best-seller out in the U.S. on Dec. 3.

The pleading must have worked: With Simple Minds having just wrapped up their first North American tour in 11 years — a short run of just seven dates this past month — frontman Jim Kerr says “there are already discussions taking place to hopefully bring Simple Minds back for more shows next summer.”

Erasure this week released the first single off its upcoming Christmas album Snow Globe, a synthpop take on the medieval Latin carol “Gaudete,” which was a folk hit in 1973 for Steeleye Span. The duo also debuted a new stop-motion animation video created by Martin Meunier and Tonya Hurley.

Two months after dropping a surprise cover of Arcade Fire’s “Ready to Start” on fans, Tears For Fears is back this week with another unlikely makeover: a new cover of Hot Chip’s 2006 electro-pop favorite “And I Was a Boy From School” (which was re-titled “Boy From School” when it was issued as a single).

Today we present the results of Part 9 of our year-long Best of the ’80s feature, a year-by-year poll of Slicing Up Eyeballs’ readers to determine the best albums of each year of the 1980s — and then, at the end of 2013, we’ll run a huge best-of-the-decade poll to crown the overall rulers of the ’80s.

The Jesus and Mary Chain has revealed the 14-song tracklist that will comprise the 11th and final LP in its forthcoming The Complete Vinyl Collection box set, a collection of B-sides and rarities — including material from the Barbed Wire Kisses album and Power of Negative Thinking box set — that were voted on by fans.

This week’s new releases include box sets collecting albums from the Ramones and Ultravox, a new collection of Christmas songs form punk legends Bad Religion, plus expanded reissues of the first six albums from Bananarama, as well as The Godfathers’ 1993 album and Belfegore’s sophomore effort.

Tonight’s edition of “Dark Wave” on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave featured music from Christian Death, Joy Division, Severed Heads, Japan, Nitzer Ebb, Specimen, Skinny Puppy, The Birthday Party, Assemblage 23, The Cure, Ministry, Lords of the New Church and much, much more.

Just months after surviving a secret liver transplant and declaring himself “a triumph of modern medicine, physics and chemistry,” legendary rocker Lou Reed — the leader of The Velvet Underground, who would later release classic solo albums such as Transformer, Berlin and New York — died today at age 71.

Not surprisingly, news of legendary rocker Lou Reed’s death traveled with lightning speed across the Internet today, and an entire generation of musicians influenced by him and The Velvet Underground quickly weighed in on the legend’s passing. Below we’ve collected social media reaction from many of them.