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.

Back in February, Cherry Red Records unveiled the tracklist for its massive, 5-disc box set Scared To Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980-1989 via the project’s Facebook page — and then almost immediately began adding more tracks to the 127-song collection.

Starting with collections from Love and Rockets and Gary Numan, Beggars Banquet this spring will launch a new series of five-album catalog box sets designed to help keep “slower selling titles” in print, an effort the label acknowledges “may be the last chance to present the albums as physical releases in the foreseeable future.”

Mike Scott of The Waterboys revealed on Twitter this week that he’s at work compiling a 7-disc box set of material — “114 tracks and counting,” featuring multiple takes of about 88 different songs — recorded during the sessions for the band’s classic 1988 album ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ that’s due for release later in this year.

Cherry Red Records this afternoon unveiled the massive, 127-song tracklist for its now 5-disc box called Scared To Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980-1989, which the U.K. label has said is inspired by Lenny Kaye’s classic Nuggets garage-rock compilation and is “devoted to the 1980s indie guitar-pop revolution.”

Cherry Red Records next spring will release a 4CD box called ‘Scared To Get Happy: A Story of Indie-Pop 1980-1989’ that the U.K. label says is inspired by the Lenny Kaye’s classic ‘Nuggets’ garage-rock compilation and is “devoted to the 1980s indie guitar-pop revolution which swept across the British Isles.”

Long-running Manchester act James has enlisted Echo & The Bunnymen for a 10-date tour of the U.K. this spring in support of the band’s ‘The Gathering Sound’ box set, a career-spanning collection that originally was due out in fall 2011 and then this past spring — and is now finally due for release next month in the U.K.