The third-annual Record Store Day is set for April 17, and this year’s exclusive releases include a reissue of Rhino’s 4LP Joy Division vinyl box set, a blue-vinyl reissue of R.E.M.’s ‘Chronic Town’ and fresh vinyl reissues from Sonic Youth, Joe Strummer and the Ramones.

After touring the U.S. last year in a somewhat odd paring with the Happy Mondays, New Wave icons Psychedelic Furs return to North America from late May through early July with a 25-date club tour.

In this installment of Milestones, we look at Depeche Mode’s classic ‘Violator,’ released exactly 20 years ago today. The record found the band at its commercial and artistic peak, and even sparked a near-riot in Los Angeles when the band showed up for an autograph session.

The ever-quirky Beck today revealed the fourth album to be covered — and the first foray into the ’80s — by his online project Record Club: the 1987 smash ‘Kick’ by INXS, which he’ll perform track-by-track with St. Vincent, Liars and Brazilian legends Os Mutantes.

U2 today revealed plans to release its recent fanclub-only remix album ‘Artificial Horizon’ as a limited-edition triple vinyl collectors’ set that will be sold to the general public only through May 14.

Simply awful news out of New Orleans tonight, as word emerges that Alex Chilton of the peerless power-pop act Big Star has died of an apparent heart attack just days before he was scheduled to perform with the reconstituted band at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

Patience, Duran Duran fans: U.S. release dates continue to shift for the band’s upcoming reissues, as the expanded editions of 1981 debut ‘Duran Duran’ and 1983’s ‘Seven and the Ragged Tiger’ this week were bumped to April 20, while the remastered editions of 1986’s ‘Notorious’ and 1988’s ‘Big Thing’ were pushed back to to July 6.

The reformatted Public Image Ltd. will kick off its upcoming North American tour with a special pre-Coachella concert on April 13 at Los Angeles’ Club Nokia, the band announced tonight.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists cover Tears for Fears’ ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ in the debut of the A.V. Club’s new ‘Undercover’ series, which will feature bands covering tunes by The Smiths, The Cure, Depeche Mode, R.E.M. and more.

Spin magazine recently dropped a goldmine into Google Books: scans of nearly every issue of the music mag, from its May 1985 debut up through October 2009. We’ve flipped through the ’85 to ’90 issues, creating links to stories about The Cure, R.E.M., The Replacements, Morrissey, New Order and many, many more.

Drummer Martin Atkins — who manned the kit in Public Image Ltd., Ministry, Pigface and Killing Joke, among other groups — today posted this absolutely brilliant video in which he uses one of the replica film canisters that housed PiL’s ‘Metal Box’ to bake fudge brownies.

This week’s new releases include ‘Purity of Essence,’ a new studio album from the Hoodoo Gurus (out in Australia, anyway); ‘Sunflower Stories,’ a four-track EP from the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie; and an Audio Fidelity gold-disc reissue of The B-52s’ ‘Cosmic Thing.’

The highlights of tonight’s ‘Dark Wave’ on Sirius XM’s 1st Wave include The Swans’ cover of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart,’ a dash of German synthpop from Cetu Javu, The March Violets’ classic ‘Snake Dance’ and a nice Bauhaus/David J/Love and Rockets run toward the end of the show.