Lloyd Cole opened his U.S. tour in Seattle earlier this month, and, while he was there, the singer-songwriter stopped by radio station KEXP to play a five-song, 20-minute solo-acoustic set that saw him perform a pair of songs off last year’s Standards and three tracks from Rattlesnakes.

Morrissey will perform at the Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Del., this summer, marking the former Smiths singer’s first U.S. concert appearance since scuttling an American tour last summer due to illness. The June 18-21 festival’s lineup was announced today, and it also features Kings of Leon, The Killers and more.

Last month, we launched the successor to our wildly popular best-albums-of-the-’80s polls, asking you, the readers of Slicing Up Eyeballs, to weigh in with your favorite songs of the year 1980, the first step in a year-long series of polls to pick the best tracks of the decade. Today, we move on to 1981.

With the 25th anniversary of the release of Depeche Mode’s smash album Violator approaching next month, we figured it was a great time to dust off this old tape from the Slicing Up Eyeballs archives that features a pair of DJs on San Diego’s 91X FM excitedly premiering the album a few days before its release on March 20, 1990.

This week’s new releases include a slew of reissues from The Pretenders, which are also being collected into a single box set, plus new albums from The B-52s’ Kate Pierson, Men at Work’s Colin Hay and The Juliana Hatfield Three, plus a new collection from Texas of re-recorded favorites.

Tonight’s edition of “Dark Wave” on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave featured music from Love and Rockets, Visage, The Stranglers, Nitzer Ebb, Coil, Ghost dance, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Pailhead, Soft Cell, The Wolfgang Press, Tones on Tail, Swans, A Split-Second, Au Pairs, Japan and more.

Welcome to the Week in Rock, where we round up all of the headlines posted on this site over the past week. This week featured big tour news from The Replacements, tragic news about the loss of Steve Strange, and items on Paul Weller, Wire, The Dead Milkmen, Colin Hay, Bob Mould, Luna, OMD and more.

For this week’s installment of our “120 Minutes” Rewind series, we travel back to 1990 for this Dave Kendall interview with Tim Burgess and the late Jon Brookes of The Charlatans — or The Charlatans U.K., as they were forced to be known as in the U.S. Watch the full 7-minute “120 MInutes” segment right here.

Steve Strange, the Blitz Kid, frontman of synthpop group Visage — best known for its Top 10 hit “Fade to Grey” — and key figure in the New Romantic movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s died today of heart failure at a hospital in Egypt, the reunited Visage announced via Facebook. He was 55.

Just a year after the release of the old-songs-resurrected set Change Becomes Us, U.K. post-punk legends Wire return with another brand-new album, their 13th overall, which they’re simply calling Wire. The band has announced U.K. and U.S. tours to support the record, and have offered up the first taste of the LP.

While The Jesus and Mary Chain are busy this year looking back on their debut Psychocandy as it marks its 30th anniversary, frontman Jim Reid is also looking forward, vowing to complete the new album that he and his brother William have been working on since reuniting in 2007.

The Dead Milkmen will head to the West Coast this spring — the important thing here is that we get to the part where you ask them how they’re gonna get there — for a seven-date tour that will take them from Vancover, B.C., down to San Diego playing shows in support of their recently released new album Pretty Music for Pretty People.

Paul Weller’s forthcoming album Saturn’s Pattern will be released in the U.S. this spring by Warner Bros. Records, the former Jam leader announced today, debuting the video for first single “White Sky” and rolling out a 10-date North American tour this June.