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.”

Midnight Oil this month will release for the first time remastered CDs of the band’s full catalog from 1978 to 1993 — the group’s first eight full-length albums, plus two EPs — and also will finally issue its 1990 VHS release “Black Rain Falls” on DVD and digitally.

Last night, Hunters & Collectors brought its 2014 tour to Sydney for the first of two club dates at the Enmore Theatre, and treated fans to an encore surprise, inviting Peter Garrett and Jim Moginie of Midnight Oil onstage to help blast through a cover of The Saints’ “Know Your Product.”

Just days after manager Gary Morris told Australian media that Midnight Oil had been offered up to $200,000 per show to reunite and tour the U.S., the band has issued a statement saying it had no current plans to reform in the wake of Peter Garrett’s newfound unemployment, and that Morris was resigning his position.

Following a Labor Party shakeup today that ousted Australia’s first female prime minister, former Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett has announced he is leaving government, as he resigns his position as Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth and won’t seek re-election.

With BP’s disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil leak now surpassing the Exxon Valdez as the worst oil spill in U.S. history, it’s only fitting that we mark Sunday’s 20th anniversary of the Midnight Oil ‘guerrilla action’ in front of the Exxon building in New York City.

Ex-Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett’s political career hasn’t been going so great lately, and things went from bad to worse today when Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd demoted the former rocker over a “bungled home-insulation scheme,” according to Reuters.