The dB’s this week released a new song as a free MP3 download — the rocker ‘Revolution of the Mind,’ featuring Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan on guitar — and announced plans to issue ‘Falling Off the Sky,’ the band’s first new studio album in 25 years, sometime in the spring of 2012.

Robyn Hitchcock this month will release ‘Chronolology,’ a 16-track, hand-picked, digital-only greatest-hits set that’s being marketed as the artist’s first-ever best-of — even though he’s been treated to at least three such compilations, all released during the mid-1990s.

U2 has revealed the full tracklist for Q magazine’s ‘AHK-toong BAY-bi Covered’ tribute album, which will feature Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, Jack White, Garbage, The Killers, Patti Smith, Damien Rice, Gavin Friday, Snow Patrol, Glasvegas and U2 itself (in remixed form).

Having wrapped their global Pandemonium Tour with a final show last December, the Pet Shop Boys now are at work writing material for their upcoming 11th album, which they hope to begin recording next month and then release sometime next year, singer Neil Tennant says in a recent post to the band’s official website.

The surviving members of INXS this week announced they’ve replaced game-show winner J.D. Fortune with new lead singer Ciaran Gribbin — a Grammy-nominated Irish singer-songwriter who has worked with Madonna, Paul McCartney and Snow Patrol — and already have begun work on songs slated for the band’s next studio album.

The now-disbanded R.E.M. today unveiled the tracklist and cover art for its forthcoming, career-spanning best-of — the 40-song ‘Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982-2011’ — and announced that ‘We All Go Back to Where We Belong,’ one of three new tracks on the set, will be issued as a single next month.

The long-discussed new album from The Jesus and Mary Chain has ‘never really come together’ Jim Reid says in a new interview, in which he attributes the lack of progress to the fact that he and his brother William simply have ‘different ideas of how to record this album.’

The now-defunct R.E.M. will release its first-ever career-spanning greatest-hits collection — ‘Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982-2011’ — in November, and Rolling Stone reports the set will include “a handful of tracks” recorded earlier this year.

John Lydon’s reconstituted Public Image Ltd. has completed recording a new album at Steve Winwood’s studio in Cotswolds, England — the band’s first since 1992′s ‘That What Is Not’ — and will release it next year, the band announced on its website this week.

The Waterboys return next week with their first new album in four years, the 14-track ‘An Appointment with Mr. Yeats,’ which features songs bandleader Mike Scott created from the lyrics of Irish poet W.B. Yeats for the stage show of the same name.

Kate Bush this morning announced she will release a brand-new album called ’50 Words for Snow’ — a 65-minute collection featuring ‘seven brand new tracks set against a background of falling snow’ — in late November on her newly launched record label, Fish People.

The Fall will release their 29th studio album in 35 years — a 10-track collection called ‘Ersatz G.B.’ — in November, when they’ll also embark on an nine-date tour of their native U.K. to mark the record’s arrival.

Mission frontman Wayne Hussey this fall will release an album with All About Eve lead singer Julianne Regan featuring ‘strange and interesting interpretations of already loved songs alongside new songs’ — including covers of Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and David Bowie.