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.”

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.’

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.

Ian McCulloch later this month will release a new live/studio 2CD set called Holy Ghosts, and the singer is letting fans download one of the studio tracks, album closer “Somewhere in My Dreams — but only until 5 p.m. BST, which is noon EDT for those of us here in the U.S.

Ian McCulloch next month will release a new 2CD set called ‘Holy Ghosts’ that combines the fan-funded studio album ‘Pro Patria Mori’ he released in limited quantities last year with an unreleased 15-track live set of “orchestral reworkings” of solo tracks and Bunnymen classics recorded last May.