On March 7 of this year — 30 years to the day after the release of The Hurting — Tears For Fears launched a new website bearing that album’s cover photo and an inscription that led some to speculate a long-overdue expanded reissue of that record finally would be released.

Mute Records is embarking on a new series of Cabaret Voltaire releases that will begin this summer with a vinyl reissue of the group’s 1981 album Red Mecca, to be followed this fall by a new box set collecting four early- to mid-’80s albums “alongside bonus CDs and DVDs” and, in early 2014, a new compilation.

The second round of 5 Albums box sets from Beggars Archive — promoted as “the last chance to present (these) albums as physical releases in the foreseeable future” — will collect full albums, live recordings and assorted bonus tracks from The Fall, The Icicle Works and Buffalo Tom, and should be out by July.

The Clash return to record stores in a big way this September, with the release of a 12-disc box set called Sound System — featuring five of the band’s six albums, a DVD with unseen footage and three discs’ worth of demos, non-album singles, rarities and B-sides — as well as a new double-disc best-of set.

EMI Music will reissue The Stranglers’ 1992 box set The Old Testament: The U.A. Studio Recordings (1977-1982), which collects the punk legends’ first six albums plus bonus singles and B-sides on four CDs, and now includes a brand-new fifth disc of rarities including live tracks, radio edits and remixes.

The release of the 5-disc box set Scared To Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980-1989 is still nearly two months away, but Cherry Red Records has begun teasing fans with some of the music that will appear on the set, including this rare 1982 flexidisc recording by The Bluebells of “Happy Birthday.”

Big Country this summer will release a four-disc box set that compiles the Scottish rockers’ BBC studio sessions, live concert appearances and performances on TV shows such as “Top of the Pops,” a collection Universal Music says “charts the spectacular rise” of the band through the ’80s.