The head-scratching combo of Lou Reed and Metallica, who’ll release their album ‘Lulu’ this fall, today released the first full track from that collaboration: ‘The View.’

This week’s headlines at Slicing Up Eyeballs — you know, in case you missed anything — included a lot of news about the now-defunct R.E.M., plus items on Public Image Ltd., The Jesus and Mary Chain, This Mortal Coil, Scruffy the Cat and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

The now-defunct R.E.M. will release its first-ever career-spanning greatest-hits collection — ‘Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage: 1982-2011’ — in November, and Rolling Stone reports the set will include “a handful of tracks” recorded earlier this year.

Manic Street Preachers are set to release a comprehensive, 38-track singles collection called National Treasures this fall, a collection they’re capping off with a brand-new single: a cover of the The The classic ‘This Is The Day,’ off 1983′s ‘Soul Mining.’

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.’