Author Richard Evans delves deeply into “a true golden age of British pop” in his just-published book “Listening to the Music the Machines Make.”

The jaw-drooping lineup of May’s Cruel World festival was unveiled this week, and we’re thrilled to announce we’ve got a pair of tickets to give away.

[tweetmeme]This is a round-up of the week’s new albums, expanded reissues and/or box sets, appearing each Monday on Slicing Up Eyeballs. All releases due out this Friday unless noted. May also include some other titles released in recent weeks but not previously featured. This week: Boomtown Rats, Tears For Fears and more.

English synthpop icons The Human League have announced their first U.S. concerts of 2018, a pair of club shows in Las Vegas and San Francisco that bookend an appearance at the Like Totally ’80s Festival in Huntington Beach, Calif. — where the group will appear on a bill with The Alarm, Gene Loves Jezebel and The Untouchables.

Still struggling from the loss of planned headliner The Human League, the promoters of this summer’s Regeneration Tour today announced they’ve been forced to scale back to a West Coast-only trek, unveiling new shows and lineups in Portland, Ore., Sacramento and Mexico City while also canceling a date in Atlanta.

Despite fans’ concerns that the entire trek had been scrubbed, it appears the Regeneration Tour is still on this summer, with Talking Heads spinoff Tom Tom Club and New Wave stars A Flock of Seagulls filling in at certain dates for The Human League, which quit the tour late month.

Just days after The Human League pulled out of this summer’s planned Regeneration Tour saying the group had been “promised one thing and delivered something so completely different,” another act on the bill, Erasure frontman Andy Bell, is warning fans that he might not be joining the tour, either.

The Regeneration Tour, which bills itself as “North America’s premier ’80s tour,” has lost another high-profile act, as The Human League this week pulled out of the summer trek, announcing “we were promised one thing and delivered something so completely different we just could not make it work, much as we wanted to.”

Billing itself as “North America’s premier ’80s tour,” the semi-annual Regeneration Tour returns this August for an undisclosed number of U.S. concerts featuring Erasure frontman Andy Bell, The Human League, Howard Jones and Information Society — but not, as tour promoters originally had hoped, the reunited Ultravox.

This week’s new releases include brand-new albums from Johnny Marr (‘The Messenger’), KMFDM (‘Kunst’) and John Foxx (‘Evidence’), plus reissues from Fine Young Cannibals, The Blue Aeroplanes and The Sound, as well as best-ofs from Kirsty MacColl and The Human League.

Vince Clarke and Martyn Ware teamed up in the late ’90s to record a pair of atmospheric albums under the moniker The Clarke & Ware Experiment. Now, a dozen years later, they’ve paired those two albums with eight CDs of unreleased material to create a limited-edition box set called The House of Illustrious.

This week’s new releases include the new EP from Dalis Car, the 5CD ‘Arkeology’ box set from World Party, a reissue of The Human League’s ‘Dare,’ the second album from Black Francis’ Grand Duchy project, an acoustic set from X’s John Doe and Exene Cervenka and a 2CD archival live set from Joe Jackson.

This past week’s Slicing Up Eyeballs headlines included news about The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order, Morrissey, Flipper, The Human League, Dead Can Dance, The Cult, Wire, Paul Weller and Happy Mondays — plus our Q&A with David J and a brand-new Auto Reverse mixtape for February.