Talking Heads offshoot Tom Tom Club — husband-and-wife rhythm section Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz — this month will release their first new music in a dozen years in the form of the 6-track EP ‘Downtown Rockers,’ and you can listen to the whole set ahead of its release via an exclusive stream on East Village Radio.

For this week’s installment of “120 Minutes” Rewind we re-visit the Kevin Seal era for a 1989 interview with Matt Johnson of The The, who discusses his band’s then-new album ‘Mind Bomb,’ his decision to assemble an actual band, professional boxing and the student uprising in China.

With about 10 days left before the release of their 11th album, ‘Elysium,’ the Pet Shop Boys have released an 8-minute interview reel with Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe. about their songwriting process and the making of the album, which already is garnering comparisons in sound and mood to 1990’s ‘Behaviour’.

In October 1988, an MTV-packaged “new music” tour featuring Living Colour, The Godfathers and The Sugarcubes hit Alabama’s Auburn University, where the music-video network filmed the latter band’s 50-minute, 14-song set for a special that aired during the “second 60” of “120 Minutes” on Christmas of that same year.

As we previously reported, Mute Records this fall will celebrate Slovenian avant-garde industrial group Laibach’s “unique take on the art of the cover version” with a new 15-track compilation called ‘An Introduction To.. Laibach / Reproduction Prohibited,’ which will include a newly recorded version of The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette.”

The Pet Shop Boys today announced that the song “Leaving” will be the second single off the forthcoming Elysium, and will be released Oct. 15 in the U.K. on CD, 12-inch and as a digital download bundle “with extra tracks and remixes.” The track is slated to premiere on BBC Radio 2 on Friday, but you can hear it here now.

Having already canceled three concerts this week over Nick Rhodes’ health, Duran Duran tonight scrapped the final three North American dates of its two-year world tour in support of All You Need Is Now — a trek that already suffered significant disruption last year when frontman Simon Le Bon lost his voice and was unable to perform.

This week’s Slicing Up Eyeballs Music Hour featured new and previously unreleased music from Ian McCulloch, World Party, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, and Mark Eitzel, plus old favorites from Game Theory, Monaco, The Sisters of Mercy, John Foxx, Hilary, Tones on Tail, The B-52s and more.

The all-too-brief early ’80s career of synthpop duo Yazoo — comprised of singer Alison Moyet and former Depeche Mode member Vince Clarke — will be anthologized next month on a new 2CD set called ‘The Collection,’ which assembles singles, cuts from the band’s two albums and both vintage and recent remixes.

Former Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins will follow up 2010’s acclaimed ‘Losing Sleep’ with his eighth solo album, ‘Understated,’ in January, the singer recently revealed — and he’ll be the subject of an upcoming documentary called “In Your Voice, In Your Heart” that chronicles his recovery from a debilitating 2005 stroke.

A new 700-page biography of The Smiths by music writer and biographer Tony Fletcher will be published in the U.K. next week — but not in the U.S. until December — and promises, through “extensive research, dozens of interviews and unprecedented access,” to tell “the complete story” of the iconic Manchester band.

Bob Mould’s first new album in three years — the 10-track ‘Silver Age’ — arrives next week, and the former Hüsker Dü frontman today debuted the record via a full-album stream at RollingStone.com. He tells the rock mag it’s no coincidence the album sounds a bit like Sugar’s just-reissued 1992 debut ‘Copper Blue.’

With plans for a September tour of the U.S. fleshing out, World Party this morning released a new music video for “Everybody’s Falling in Love,” one of the 70 previously unreleased tracks on the ‘Arkeology’ box set. The video follows a sad black-and-white guy stuck in a color world where everybody’s making out all the time.