The Ocean Blue has completed recording its first new album in six years — due out some time later this year — and has announced a handful of concerts across the country this summer to be followed by what, at the moment, remains a standalone Detroit show in November. Full details right here.

Former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe performed a pair of new songs during a short opening set for Patti Smith at New York City’s Webster Hall, performing the electronics-backed “Your Capricious Soul” and “Drive to the Ocean” with help from Andy LeMaster of Now It’s Overhead. Watch them here.

Classic post-punk outfit A Certain Ratio has dusted off and reworked a cover of Talking Heads’ “Houses in Motion” that it recorded with famed Factory Records house producer Martin Hannett in 1980 with the intention that Grace Jones would sing the lead vocal. Check out the cover and its video here.

Ministry performed the first of six special Record Store Day-related sets in Chicago on Saturday night, with frontman Al Jourgensen enlisting old bandmate Chris Connelly to help perform what was billed as a “Wax Trax!-era” set that largely focused on the band’s late-’80s, early-’90s albums. Video and setlist here.

Robert Smith and nine other members of The Cure past and present were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor at a ceremony in Brooklyn tonight that also saw the band’s current lineup play a five-song set. See video of the speeches and performances right here.

For this latest installment of our Vintage Video series, we honor the life and music of The Beat’s Ranking Roger — who died Monday — with the single best document of the 2 Tone era, the criminally out-of-print concert film “Dance Craze: The Best of British Ska… Live!” Watch the whole film right here.

Over the weekend in Copenhagen, New Order’s Bernard Sumner and Suede’s Brett Anderson appeared on a panel discussion at the CPH: DOZ film festival to discuss their bands’ respective Mike Christie-directed documentaries, “New Order: Decades” and “Suede: The Insatiable Ones.” Watch it here.

It’s been a big week for Johnny Marr, first with the announcement of a new round of North American touring in support of his third solo album Call the Comet, and now the release of a new non-album single: the synth-splashed, Electronic-reminiscent “Armatopia.” Check it out right here.

The four discs’ worth of Kate Bush rarities, B-sides, remixes and cover versions that filled out the back half of last year’s second CD box set of the singer’s reissued catalog will get their own separate release next month in a new box set called The Other Sides. See the full tracklist right here.

Robert Forster, who co-founded and led the beloved Australian indie-pop combo The Go-Betweens with the late Grant McLennan, will release Inferno — his seventh solo LP and first in four years — next month. Below, you can stream the title track, “Inferno (Brisbane in Summer).”

The 1983 debut album by San Francisco new-wave rockers Wire Train — which spawned the singles “Chamber of Hellos,” “I’ll Do You” and “Never” — will be reissued on CD this week, expanded with six bonus tracks including B-sides, remixes and a cover of Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul.”

Former Cocteau Twins frontwoman Elizabeth Fraser continued her unexpected public reemergence this week by performing, as advertised, with Massive Attack as the trip-hop legends celebrate the 21st anniversary of their album Mezzanine. See video from the group’s first two shows right here.

Just days before he’s set to release a new album recorded with his version of legendary 2 Tone-era ska act The Beat, frontman Ranking Roger on Monday revealed that, after suffering a stroke last summer, he was diagnosed with two brain tumors and lung cancer. Roger disclosed his medical issues via a nearly 9-minute video.