This week I’m featuring 80’s deep cuts on Mental Jukebox. They’re the non-charting singles. The forgotten b-sides. The unheralded album staples. While they may not be the first songs that come to mind when you think of the 80’s, they’re some of the most important musical statements of the decade.

With a prolific output of five studio albums in a six year stretch, The Police catalog came together brilliantly and quickly. For my last 80’s deep cut, I’m going with the band’s final studio output—”Murder by Numbers”, the final track on Synchronicity. It’s a song that sounds less like The Police and more like the jazz-infused solo work of Sting that the world would soon hear. “Murder by Numbers” is the foreshadowing of a different era.

“Now you can join the ranks of the illustrious in history's great dark hall of fame. All our greatest killers were industrious. At least the ones that we all know by name.”