Midnight Oil today announced plans to release its new studio album — a 12-song collection titled Resist — next year and mount what it’s calling the band’s final tour.

Bones Hillman, who joined Midnight Oil following the recording of its breakthrough album Diesel and Dust and who is described by the band as “the bassist with the beautiful voice,” died on Saturday after a battle with cancer, the group announced on social media. He was 62.

Midnight Oil is planning to release not one but two new musical projects this year, beginning with an eight-song mini-album called The Makaratta Project recorded with “some of our First Nations friends” to be released this summer, followed by a proper Oils studio album due out later in the year, according to the band’s website.

A new documentary chronicling Midnight Oil’s pivotal year of 1984 — which saw the release of Red Sails in the Sunset and Peter Garrett’s failed run for the Australian Senate as a Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate — will screen in Australian theaters in May before an international rollout.

Midnight Oil recently announced it would kick off its global reunion tour with a “back-to-basics pub gig” in Sydney this week, but have now pre-empted that by playing a surprise warm-up set Sunday night that marks the band’s first public performance in eight years. We’ve got the full setlist and fan-shot video here.

For this week’s installment of Vintage Video, we turn to the very short-lived late-night talk show “Thicke of the Night,” hosted by the late Alan Thicke, and this 1984 visit by Aussie powerhouse Midnight Oil.
The band — not exactly a well-known act in America at the time — was allowed to perform three songs.

Australian rock powerhouse Midnight Oil is expected to announce details on Friday of its promised reunion tour, shows that would mark the band’s first performances together since 2009’s Sound Relief concerts to benefit the victims of that year’s bushfires. It’s not clear what the band has planned, but it’s promising “a busy year ahead.”