The Pixies this morning announced that, in addition to a handful of recently unveiled festival dates, the band will stage its own North American tour this spring, unveiling 12 non-festival shows in May with a promise that “more dates will be announced shortly, too.” The band says it will debut new music on the tour.

This week’s new releases include brand-new studio albums from U.K. post-punk groups Gang of Four (‘What Happens Next’) and The Pop Group (‘Citizen Zombie’), plus a five-disc box set from The Sound that collects three studio albums, an EP, a live record and a disc of early tracks.

Well, that’s embarrassing: We missed our own birthday. Exactly six years ago yesterday, Slicing Up Eyeballs launched with nothing more than a simple 91-word post announcing plans to provide “the latest info on new albums, reissues, upcoming reunions and tour dates.”

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we resurrect something we first shared way back in 2010: a pair of TV news reports from WBNS in Columbus, Ohio, about the “Cocteau Fever” surrounding the Cocteau Twins’ Sept. 19, 1985, concert there — just one of five stops on its U.S. tour that year.

The Psychedelic Furs this week rolled out what the band is calling the “first wave” of dates for its spring tour, nine shows in the eastern U.S. this May that will be followed a trio of “Fireworks Finale” concerts in September at the famed Hollywood Bowl with The B-52s. See full dates here.

Lloyd Cole opened his U.S. tour in Seattle earlier this month, and, while he was there, the singer-songwriter stopped by radio station KEXP to play a five-song, 20-minute solo-acoustic set that saw him perform a pair of songs off last year’s Standards and three tracks from Rattlesnakes.

Morrissey will perform at the Firefly Music Festival in Dover, Del., this summer, marking the former Smiths singer’s first U.S. concert appearance since scuttling an American tour last summer due to illness. The June 18-21 festival’s lineup was announced today, and it also features Kings of Leon, The Killers and more.

Last month, we launched the successor to our wildly popular best-albums-of-the-’80s polls, asking you, the readers of Slicing Up Eyeballs, to weigh in with your favorite songs of the year 1980, the first step in a year-long series of polls to pick the best tracks of the decade. Today, we move on to 1981.

With the 25th anniversary of the release of Depeche Mode’s smash album Violator approaching next month, we figured it was a great time to dust off this old tape from the Slicing Up Eyeballs archives that features a pair of DJs on San Diego’s 91X FM excitedly premiering the album a few days before its release on March 20, 1990.

This week’s new releases include a slew of reissues from The Pretenders, which are also being collected into a single box set, plus new albums from The B-52s’ Kate Pierson, Men at Work’s Colin Hay and The Juliana Hatfield Three, plus a new collection from Texas of re-recorded favorites.

Welcome to the Week in Rock, where we round up all of the headlines posted on this site over the past week. This week featured big tour news from The Replacements, tragic news about the loss of Steve Strange, and items on Paul Weller, Wire, The Dead Milkmen, Colin Hay, Bob Mould, Luna, OMD and more.

For this week’s installment of our “120 Minutes” Rewind series, we travel back to 1990 for this Dave Kendall interview with Tim Burgess and the late Jon Brookes of The Charlatans — or The Charlatans U.K., as they were forced to be known as in the U.S. Watch the full 7-minute “120 MInutes” segment right here.

Steve Strange, the Blitz Kid, frontman of synthpop group Visage — best known for its Top 10 hit “Fade to Grey” — and key figure in the New Romantic movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s died today of heart failure at a hospital in Egypt, the reunited Visage announced via Facebook. He was 55.