Echo & The Bunnymen announced this week that the band has signed to BMG, marking the group’s return to a major label for the first time since the 1990s. On top of that, the band said, in a Facebook post, that it’s “looking forward to sharing future releases very soon.”

The Arcade Fire’s current tour has seen the indie-rock darlings trotting out a great variety of high-profile covers. Now the band’s turned to Echo & The Bunnymen, bringing that band’s frontman, Ian McCulloch, onstage in London tonight to perform that band’s 1983 classic “The Cutter.”

With Echo & The Bunnymen’s 11th studio album Meteorites set for release in Europe one week from today, the band this morning began streaming the record — which Ian McCulloch calls “more edgy than anything I’ve ever done” — in full via both The Guardian in the U.K. and VPRO in the Netherlands.

Echo & The Bunnymen today rescheduled most of the remainder of the band’s U.K. tour as frontman Ian McCulloch recovers from a throat infection, announcing several makeup dates in June and early July following the release of the band’s new album Meteorites.

Echo & The Bunnymen today premiered the first music video to promote their upcoming album Meteorites, a Roger Sargent-directed clip for sweeping single “Lovers on the Run” that finds frontman Ian McCulloch sitting in a dark corner as images are projected across him.

Echo & The Bunnymen this morning revealed the first details of their 2014 touring plans in support of forthcoming album Meteorites, announcing a 12-date tour this May that mostly will play the U.K. but also will include a trio of concerts in major cities in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Echo & The Bunnymen today revealed that the band’s upcoming 12th studio album — produced by Killing Joke bassist Youth — is nearing completion and will be formally announced soon, and that frontman Ian McCulloch “feels it’s the band’s best work for a very long time.”

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we present this 30-minute live set by Echo & The Bunnymen that was filmed Aug. 26, 1982, at Sefton Park in Liverpool and aired on the BBC 2 series “Pop Carnival,” a performance that finds Ian McCulloch squarely between their second and third albums.

When it came time for Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant to put together a new band “outside of the restrictive confines of Bunnymen-world” last year, he actually ended up tapping some Bunnymen for the job: namely former bassist Les Pattinson and current drummer Nick Kilroe.

With demos already in hand, the Echo & The Bunnymen braintrust — frontman Ian McCulloch and guitarist Will Sergeant — will begin recording their 12th studio album within the next six weeks with Killing Joke bassist Youth likely sitting in as producer, the band announced today.

This week’s new releases include the new 2CD set from Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch, plus new albums from The Flaming Lips and Meat Puppets, plus a live Dead Can Dance album, a Simple Minds best-of, a reissue of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and the vinyl release of The Replacements’ ‘Songs For Slim.’

In our latest round-up of links, we offer up a 50-minute webcast of Depeche Mode’s album-launch concert in Vienna last month, full streams of new albums from Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch and Dead Can Dance, plus news of a high honor for Kate Bush.

Ian McCulloch has made no secret over the years of the fact that he considers “The Killing Moon” to be “the greatest song ever written,” and, in this new video for the NME, he explains how the song was born, via a backwards David Bowie chord sequence and some divine lyrical intervention.