Our year-long Best of the ’80s feature continues this month as we turn to 1981, and once again ask Slicing Up Eyeballs’ readers to weigh in on their favorite albums of that year in our ongoing quest to rank the releases of each year of the decade over the course of 2013.

With Depeche Mode set to formally launch its new album Delta Machine this evening a performance on the “Live on Letterman” concert series, the band today unveiled the long-awaited dates to its North American tour, a trek that opens Aug. 22 in Detroit and runs through Oct. 8 in Phoenix.

Billing itself as “North America’s premier ’80s tour,” the semi-annual Regeneration Tour returns this August for an undisclosed number of U.S. concerts featuring Erasure frontman Andy Bell, The Human League, Howard Jones and Information Society — but not, as tour promoters originally had hoped, the reunited Ultravox.

KMFDM is currently in the midst of an 18-date tour of the United States in support of the band’s just-released 18th studio album ‘Kunst’ — and we’ve got two pairs of tickets to see the band on March 21 at New York City’s Irving Plaza that we’re going to be giving away to two lucky Slicing Up Eyeballs readers.

Depeche Mode is set to stream its “Live From Letterman” concert from New York at 8 p.m. EDT tonight, but, in the meantime, here’s a little something to tide fans over: A brand-new video from Soulsavers featuring Dave Gahan on lead vocals, a clip for the track “Take” off last year’s ‘The Light the Dead See.’

This week’s new releases include the first new David Bowie album in a decade, a “lost album” from Duran Duran spinoff TV Mania, a 2CD set of Jellyfish instrumentals, a Pogues 2CD best-of, a Pixies radio broadcast from 1991 and a live Cabaret Voltaire DVD filmed in 1992.

Tonight’s edition of “Dark Wave” — the Sunday night “darker side of alternative” show on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave — featured Skinny Puppy, Soft Cell, Front Line Assembly, Concrete Blonde, Sad Lovers and Giants, Bauhaus, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Damned, Siouxisie and the Banshees and much 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 posts about R.E.M., Depeche Mode, Sparks, New Order, Midnight Oil, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Daniel Ash, The House of Love, Peter Murphy and more.

Seems Morrissey’s health issues aren’t behind him, after all: Six dates into his rescheduled North American tour, the former Smiths frontman this afternoon announced that tonight’s concert at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco “will not take place” due to the singer’s “ongoing medical condition.”

Today we unveil the results of Part 1 of our year-long Best of the ’80s feature, an ambitious, year-by-year poll of Slicing Up Eyeballs’ readers to determine just what were the best albums of each year of the 1980s — and then, when that’s all said and done at the end of 2013, we’ll run a monster best-of-the-decade poll.

Sparks — aka brothers Ron and Russell Mael — this month will release their first-ever live album, a 2CD set called Two Hands One Mouth recorded on their European tour last year that found the duo performing for the first time without a full band or computers — a show they’re bringing to Los Angeles and San Francisco this spring.

For this week’s “120 Minutes” Rewind, we bring in someone not normally associated with “120 Minutes”: Original MTV VJ Martha Quinn, who is seen in this clip interviewing Michael Aston of Gene Loves Jezebel for the alt-music program during its very early incarnation in 1986.

Depeche Mode’s visit to Austin, Texas, next week for the South By Southwest Music Festival won’t just be all-talk: The band today announced that, in addition to its Q&A session about upcoming album ‘Delta Machine,’ it will perform its first-ever showcase at the annual music festival on Friday, March 15.