This week’s new releases include Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s ‘The History of Modern Tour: Live in Berlin’ CD/book combo, plus a 2CD reissue of Shriekback’s ‘Oil and Gold,’ a reissue of Sonic Youth’s 2008 Starbucks exclusive best-of ‘Hits Are For Squares’ and the archival ‘Live at Montreaux 1980’ from Rockpile.

The playlist from tonight’s ‘Dark Wave’ — the weekly Sunday night ‘darker side of alternative’ show on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave — features Killing Joke, The Smiths, Shriekback, Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, Clan of Xymox and much more.

Our latest link round-up includes interviews with Big Audio Dynamite’s Mick Jones, Exene Cervenka of X and The Motels’s Martha Davis, plus a look at how the soundtrack to ‘Urgh! A Music War’ spotlighted early ’80s U.K. reggae.

Morrissey is set to follow up this summer’s headline-grabbing European tour with 10 U.S. dates in November, a trek that will be announced Monday — and will mark the former Smiths singer’s first American concerts since a pair of cancellation-prone visits in 2009.

We missed this when it was announced, but Spandau Ballet frontman Tony Hadley is in the midst of his first-ever run of solo shows in the U.S., a six-date tour that opened Saturday in New York and hit Chicago and Los Angeles earlier this week. Luckily for us, ex-KROQ/current 1st Wave DJ Richard Blade was on hand with his camera.

The career-spanning box set from James — ‘The Gathering Sound,’ featuring three CDs, a DVD, a 12-inch record and 8GB of digital music — finally is set for release this fall, and will come with all of the band’s albums plus 32 previously unreleased recordings, 12 of which are completely unreleased songs.

Eagle Rock Entertainment this fall will release a DVD compiling Talking Heads live performances from across the band’s touring career, an 18-track set called ‘Chronology’ that spans the years 1975 to 1983 — and includes the quartet performing “Life During Wartime” during its brief reunion at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Twenty years ago today, first-time director Samuel Bayer gathered several dozen fans and three young musicians on a Culver City, Calif., soundstage to film the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ a soon-to-be iconic clip — the infamous high school pep rally from hell — that ultimately would be as era-defining as the song itself.

Just eight months after a-ha’s farewell concert in Oslo, the Norwegian pop trio — saying they were ‘shaken to the soul’ — have announced they will reunite later this month to perform at the national memorial service honoring the victims of last month’s mass killings in that country.

In December 1988, when Dinosaur Jr entered Boston’s famed Fort Apache Studios, to record a track for ‘The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young,’ they cut not one but two songs: ‘Lotta Love,’ which would be included on the disc alongside covers by the Pixies, The Flaming Lips and Sonic Youth, and ‘I’ve Been Waiting For You.’

Much has been made about the loss of album art in the download age, but pop-culture maven Matthew Chojnacki argues that even more endangered are the 7- and 12-inch single sleeves of the 1980s — ephemeral splashes of music history that he’s compiled in the new book ‘Put the Needle on the Record: The 1980s at 45 Revolutions Per Minute.’

Members of long-lost Boston college-radio favorites Scruffy the Cat — part of the so-called late-’80s cowpunk scene that helped spawn the alt-country movement — have reunited around cancer-stricken frontman Charlie Chesterman after two decades apart and will play two headlining shows in their hometown this October.

The folks over at the U.K. arm of Rhino Records continue to dig through the video archive of material by The Smiths, and now they’ve unearthed this 17-minute ‘lost’ documentary about the band, which they believe was commissioned by the label in 1992 in support of the ‘Best…’ compilation.