Eye in the Sky

It was the first of three Project albums recorded on analog equipment and mixed to a Sony PCM 1610 digital master alongside the half-inch 30 ips analog master. Parsons told Ultimate Classic Rock that he wanted to move away from theme-driven concept albums: let's just go in and make an album and then maybe at the end decide what it's all about, though Songfacts quotes him on a big-brother-is-watching-you concept. Parsons plays keyboards, Fairlight and Linn drum machine, Woolfson Wurlitzer and piano, with Bairnson, Paton and Elliott, and Chris Rainbow, Lenny Zakatek, Colin Blunstone and Elmer Gantry singing on individual songs. Andrew Powell conducted the brass band and orchestra arrangements.

It reached 7 on the Billboard 200 and 27 in the UK, and 1 in Austria, Germany and Spain, going platinum in the US, double platinum in Canada and silver in the UK. It was nominated for the 1983 Grammy for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, and the 35th-anniversary box set (December 1, 2017) won Best Immersive Audio Album at the 2019 Grammys. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Ken Tucker called it a hopelessly banal album, while Billboard praised the tradition of Pink Floyd's orchestrally and technically perfect pop/rock progressivism, and AllMusic's Erlewine called it arguably the most consistent Alan Parsons Project album. A 2026 Expanded Edition came out on March 27, 2026 on Cooking Vinyl, remastered at Abbey Road by Miles Showell; Paton called it probably the pinnacle.