Jane’s Addiction this week released the second track from their upcoming album ‘The Great Escape Artist’: the slow-burning ‘Irresistible Force,’ which premiered yesterday on Los Angeles’ KROQ and is available to purchase starting today. You can stream it here.

Tonight’s installment of Slicing Up Eyeballs on Strangeways Radio featured new music from Dalis Car, The Wild Swans and Tommy Stinson, and favorites from Electronic, The Smiths, David Byrne and The Stone Roses — plus Suede covering The Pretenders and The Wedding Present covering The Cure.

Saturday night, following an eight-year absence, MTV’s iconic alternative-music show ‘120 Minutes’ returned with a new format and a familiar face: late-’90s host Matt Pinfield. The whole show is now online; watch it here.

When Bob Mould stopped by The AV Club for its Undercover web series, the producers asked him to perform Sugar’s “If I Can’t Change Your Mind,” one of the few songs left on the current list.

Some exciting news on the radio front: Slicing Up Eyeballs will guest-host Sunday night’s installment of ‘Dark Wave,’ the weekly show that explores the ‘darker side of alternative’ on satellite-radio network Sirius XM’s classic-alternative station 1st Wave.

This month’s tape features recent tracks from Paul Weller and Gang of Four, and classic cuts from The Clash, Camouflage and Simple Minds, plus British Sea Power covering The Cure, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs remaking Sonic Youth and The Shop Assistants doing The Jesus and Mary Chain.

This is a little more mainstream than what we usually cover, but it’s hard to deny the significance: Thirty years ago today, on Aug. 1, 1981, MTV went on the air (‘Ladies and gentlemen, rock ‘n’ roll…’), changing the course of music in the ’80s and beyond.

This week’s new releases include ‘The Coldest Winter For a Hundred Years,’ the first new album from The Wild Swans in 21 years, plus ‘Swing,’ a CD/12-inch combo from New Order’s Gillian & Stephen and expanded reissues of the first two albums from Pop Will Eat Itself.

The playlist from tonight’s ‘Dark Wave’ — the weekly Sunday night ‘darker side of alternative’ show on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave — features tracks by Joy Division, Lords of the New Church, Death Cult, Shriekback, Visage and many more.

Daniel Ash — he of ’80s darkwave trifecta Bauhaus, Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets — turns 54 today, and to mark the occasion, we present this little nugget: It’s a promo for MTV’s ‘120 Minutes’ featuring a cue-card reading Ash and his Love and Rockets bandmates David J and Kevin Haskins that aired sometime around 1986.

Next week, Liverpool’s The Wild Swans — the brainchild of former Teardrop Explodes keyboardist Paul Simpson — will release their first album in 21 years and only their third overall, a 13-track collection called ‘The Coldest Winter For a Hundred Years’ that features veterans of Echo & The Bunnymen, Spiritualized and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we bring you this pristine, 95-minute R.E.M. concert filmed on the ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’ tour on Oct. 2, 1985, for the German TV show ‘Rockpalast.’

A trio of ’80s college-rock vets — Bob Mould, Throwing Muses and The Dead Milkmen — are among the headliners announced today for the 2011 installment of the Athens PopFest, set for Oct. 11-15 in Athens, Ga.