The reconfigured Big Country — with The Alarm’s Mike Peters filling in for the late Stuart Adamson and the new addition of original Simple Minds bassist Derek Forbes — will release a new album titled ‘The Journey’ this spring and embark on a world tour that will hit the U.K., Europe and North America.

Meat Puppets returns this spring with their 14th studio album — the 12-track Rat Farm, which Curt Kirkwood dubs “real blown-up folk music” — and will support the release with a spring U.S. tour that will include as-yet-unannounced appearances at the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas.

Simple Minds today revealed the tracklist for the new best-of collection it first announced last fall, confirming that the band’s career-spanning ‘Celebrate — The Greatest Hits+’ will be released this spring in a 2CD, 36-song format as well as a 3CD, 50-song edition with each version featuring a pair of new songs.

So it appears “maybe two or three days” meant closer to a week, but Kevin Shields has kept good to his word as My Bloody Valentine tonight released the band’s 22-years-in-the-making follow-up to Loveless, a 9-track album called mbv that, upon news of its release, crashed the MBV site preventing anyone from hearing it for hours.

U.K. imprint Cooking Vinyl today announced it has signed Alison Moyet to a worldwide deal with plans to release the former Yazoo singer’s eighth studio album this May, an electronic-based collection that signer describes both as “prog-pop” and “born of reconstructed improvisation.”

It’s been a few years since former Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist Steven Severin expressed hope that he could one day work with The Cure’s Robert Smith on new music together as The Glove, and while it’s unclear whether that ever happened, it appears there’s something on the horizon from the short-lived side project.

The Ocean Blue — best known for 1989’s Echo & The Bunnymen-like debut single “Between Something and Nothing” — will release ‘Ultramarine,’ the band’s first new album in 13 years, this March, then play “shows throughout the U.S. starting in April,” according to a post on the group’s Facebook page.