John Lydon’s reconstituted Public Image Ltd. has completed recording a new album at Steve Winwood’s studio in Cotswolds, England — the band’s first since 1992′s ‘That What Is Not’ — and will release it next year, the band announced on its website this week.

Given yesterday’s news, it seemed to appropriate to dust off and post this episode of my Slicing Up Eyeballs show on Strangeways Radio from March 8, a show devoted entirely to R.E.M. to mark the release of the band’s 15th — and now, it turns out, final — album ‘Collapse Into Now.’

Three days after R.E.M.’s 2008 tour wrapped in Mexico City, the band posted this six-song, 39-minute encore set from that final concert — an appearance Michael Stipe told fans would be ‘our last show for a long time,’ but now stands as the group’s final performance.

R.E.M. — the iconic college-rock band that soared to major-label uperstardom in the late ’80s and early ’90s before suffering the loss of a key original member — announced today that it has ‘decided to call it a day as a band’ after 31 years together.

With the first two titles of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s 2CD/1DVD reissue series — 1985′s ‘Psychocandy’ and 1987′s ‘Darklands’ — now out, Demon Music Group today released the final two trailers for the project, previews of 1994′s ‘Stoned & Dethroned’ and 1998′s ‘Munki,’ which will be released Oct. 3.

Boston college-radio favorites Scruffy the Cat — part of the late-’80s cowpunk scene that helped spawn the alt-country movement — have canceled a pair of reunion shows that had been scheduled for Oct. 21 and 22 at the band’s old haunt T.T. the Bear’s Place in Cambridge, Mass.

This week’s episode of Slicing Up Eyeballs on Strangeways Radio featured new music from INXS, The Waterboys and Robert Smith of The Cure, old favorites by The House of Love and The Specials, plus listener requests for The Replacements, Wire and The Smiths.