This week’s new releases include ‘The Coldest Winter For a Hundred Years,’ the first new album from The Wild Swans in 21 years, plus ‘Swing,’ a CD/12-inch combo from New Order’s Gillian & Stephen and expanded reissues of the first two albums from Pop Will Eat Itself.

The playlist from tonight’s ‘Dark Wave’ — the weekly Sunday night ‘darker side of alternative’ show on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave — features tracks by Joy Division, Lords of the New Church, Death Cult, Shriekback, Visage and many more.

Daniel Ash — he of ’80s darkwave trifecta Bauhaus, Tones on Tail and Love and Rockets — turns 54 today, and to mark the occasion, we present this little nugget: It’s a promo for MTV’s ‘120 Minutes’ featuring a cue-card reading Ash and his Love and Rockets bandmates David J and Kevin Haskins that aired sometime around 1986.

Next week, Liverpool’s The Wild Swans — the brainchild of former Teardrop Explodes keyboardist Paul Simpson — will release their first album in 21 years and only their third overall, a 13-track collection called ‘The Coldest Winter For a Hundred Years’ that features veterans of Echo & The Bunnymen, Spiritualized and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we bring you this pristine, 95-minute R.E.M. concert filmed on the ‘Fables of the Reconstruction’ tour on Oct. 2, 1985, for the German TV show ‘Rockpalast.’

A trio of ’80s college-rock vets — Bob Mould, Throwing Muses and The Dead Milkmen — are among the headliners announced today for the 2011 installment of the Athens PopFest, set for Oct. 11-15 in Athens, Ga.

Following yesterday’s brouhaha over Morrissey’s comments on stage about the mass murder in Norway, the former Smiths frontman today released an official statement condemning the killing as ‘horrific,’ but reiterating his attack on fast-food meat, writing, ‘You cannot ignore animal suffering because animals “are not us.” ‘