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.