Duran Duran next month will receive its first-ever double-disc best-of, the 34-track ‘The Biggest and the Best,’ which covers the years 1981 through 1989, collecting 20 of the band’s Top 40 hits as well as some “key album tracks” — while also omitting some pretty sizable hits from the band’s early ’90s renaissance.

Scott McCaughey tells the Seattle Weekly that former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck’s self-titled album — with guest turns by Mike Mills and Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker — could be out as early as next month, when Buck debuts his new band, dubbed Richard M. Nixon, at a pair of Seattle shows with Young Fresh Fellows.

Mute Records this fall continues its new compilation series An Introduction To… with a disc celebrating Slovenian avant-garde industrial group Laibach’s “unique take on the art of the cover version,” compiling 15 tracks, including newly recorded version of The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” and Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

Long-running electronic outfit Delerium — led by former Front Line Assembly member and Skinny Puppy collaborator Bill Leeb — this fall will release the 15-track ‘Music Box Opera,’ the group’s first new studio album in six years, which is preceded by the debut today of music video for lead-off single “Monarch.”

The Dead Milkmen recently announced a pair of October shows — a festival appearance in upstate New York followed by a Halloween bash in their hometown of Philadelphia — and revealed that the band is studio-bound to work on new music, perhaps a follow-up to 2011’s ‘The King In Yellow,’ the band’s first album in 15 years.

Reunited synthpop favorites Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark will spend September and October finishing up English Electric, their planned 12th studio album and the follow-up to 2010’s very well-received comeback record History of Modern, the group announced this morning in an e-mail to fans.

Killing Joke unloaded a flurry of news this morning, announcing that “missing” frontman Jaz Coleman “appeared today from his retreat in the Western Sahara” as well as revealing plans for a 3CD ‘KJ in Dub’ remix project and the cancellation of a planned $300-a-ticket studio concert that was to have been filmed for a DVD.