After announcing just before Christmas that their new album had just been mastered, My Bloody Valentine took the stage tonight in London for the first live date of the year, with Kevin Shields surprising fans by answering a heckler with news news that it could be released in “maybe two or three days.”

My Bloody Valentine delivered a Christmas surprise to fans, announcing on Facebook this evening that the band finished mastering its 21-years-in-the-making follow-up to the 1991 classic ‘Loveless’ three days ago. Whether the record still will be released online before year’s end, as Kevin Shields pledged, remains to be seen.

It was shocking enough when the long-delayed reissues of My Bloody Valentine’s two studio albums finally were released earlier this year, but now frontman Kevin Shields claims he’ll release the 21-year-in-the-making follow-up to ‘Loveless’ by the end of the year — and will follow that up with an EP of even newer music.

Now that My Bloody Valentine’s long-delayed reissues are finally out, the Analog Loyalist who runs the Power of Independent Trucking blog says there’s a packaging foul-up with ‘Loveless’: the two discs, featuring separate masterings of the 1991 album, are reversed.

This week’s new releases include — at long last — the reissues of My Bloody Valentine’s two studio albums, plus a compilation of EPs and unreleased tracks, as well as the new self-titled debut from Heavy Blanket, a project that finds Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis playing ‘psych-drenched instrumental blues jams.’

With My Bloody Valentine’s reissues now due out in a little more than a week, Sony today offered up the first photographic evidence of their existence, posting photos of the what purports to be the packaging of the two reissues and the new ‘EPs 1988-1991’ compilation on the band’s Facebook page.