The Police Arrested Us With ‘Synchronicity’ 40 Years Ago

British rock band The Police released Synchronicity, their final studio album, on June 17, 1983. You could say the band went out with a bang.

With tracks like “Every Breath You Take,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” “Walking in Your Footsteps” and “King of Pain,” you’d be forgiven if you thought you were listening to a greatest hits album.

The trio of Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers weren’t getting along very well when they recorded the album on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1982 (Sting and Copeland even had fisticuffs). But their finished project is a sonic masterpiece, filled with literary and philosophical influences and images of intense longing and existential despair.

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In 2019, “Every Breath You Take” was honored by BMI for achieving 15 million radio plays. The song with a stalker as narrator is one of the greatest — if not misinterpreted — pop songs of all time.

And “Wrapped Around Your Finger” has one of MTV’s most memorable videos:

Synchronicity was a commercial hit, too. In the U.S., the album topped the Billboard 200 and spent 17 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1, knocking Michael Jackson’s Thriller from the top spot.