Midnight Oil is planning to release not one but two new musical projects this year, beginning with an eight-song mini-album called The Makaratta Project recorded with “some of our First Nations friends” to be released this summer, followed by a proper Oils studio album due out later in the year, according to the band’s website.

Reunited Scottish indie-pop favorites Close Lobsters — immortalized on the NME’s genre-defining C86 compilation cassette — next week will release their first new album in 31 years, a 10-song collection that’s preceded by the release of two tracks: “Godless” and “All Compasses Go Wild.”

Canadian singer-songwriter Allister Thompson — who has recorded as The Gateless Gate, Twilight Fields and Khan Tengri — later this month will release a tribute to Grant McLennan, a collection of some of Thompson’s favorite songs written by the late Go-Betweens co-founder. Listen to three of the tracks right here.

The Dead Milkmen are back in the studio, working on the band’s first new album in six years and the follow-up to 2017’s Welcome to the End of the World EP. To help bide the time, they’ve also launched a new weekly video series in which they’ll answer “big questions.” Watch the first installment right here.

The Throwing Muses will release Sun Racket — their 10th studio album, and the college-rock favorites’ first in seven years — on the Fire Records label this May, bandleader Kristin Hersh announced this week in the latest edition of her newsletter. Full details and Kristin Hersh solo tour dates here.

After teasing big news for the past few days, The Psychedelic Furs have announced they’ll at long last release their eighth studio album — the band’s first record in 29 years — this spring. The 12-track collection is preceded by the single “Don’t Believe,” which you can hear right now.

Omnivore Recordings this spring will finish its Game Theory reissue campaign by releasing a new collection of almost entirely unreleased material recorded by the jangle-pop outfit’s final lineup in 1989 and 1990, when late frontman Scott Miller brought on board Michael Quercio of the recently broken-up The Three O’Clock.