Classic synthpop duo Erasure — Andy Bell and Vince Clarke — this week announced plans to release their 17th studio album this spring. The 10-track World Be Gone, due out May 19 on Mute Records, will be the group’s first new album since 2014’s The Violet Flame.

The John Darnielle-led Mountain Goats this week announced their 16th studio album, a guitar-less record called Goths that, as its title suggests, celebrates the dark musical genre: “the friends whose bands never made it out of Fender’s Ballroom, the Gene Loves Jezebels of the world.”

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we dip into the vaults of “Rockpalast” for this performance by The Smiths in 1984. This 15-song set finds the band burning through its early material to the point that it encores with a couple of its best-known songs that already had been performed earlier.

Seminal shoegaze act Ride went 21 years without releasing new music, but after debuting “Charm Assault” this week, the wait for more was just 24 hours. The band has now shared a second new track, the meditative “Home is a Feeling,” which you can hear here.

With a European tour already announced, Depeche Mode are ramping up to unveil North American dates in support of their upcoming 14th studio album, Spirit — and they’re asking fans to reserve “a spot in line” for an upcoming ticket presale, then work to promote in order to move up in line.

Echo & The Bunnymen plans to release on 180-gram vinyl a 1985 live set that was recorded in Sweden — but only if enough fans vote for it on the Run Out Groove imprint, which uses crowdsourcing to determine which projects to press each month.

Fishbone, long-running masters of the genre mashup, stopped by Seattle’s KEXP radio station just two days after the election last fall to perform a four-song, 30-minute in-studio session. Host Kevin Cole gets the band started by saying, “I know I could use some funk to get me out of my post-election funk.”