This Year’s Model by Elvis Costello

This Year's Model, Elvis Costello's second album, came out on Radar Records on 17 March 1978, and it's a sneer set to a sprint. On the debut he'd borrowed Clover as a backing band; this time he had his own gang, the Attractions, with Steve Nieve on keyboards, Bruce Thomas on bass and Pete Thomas, no relation, on drums. Nick Lowe produced again, with Roger Béchirian engineering, and they knocked it out at Eden Studios in London in eleven days spread across the turn of the year.

The songs had mostly been road-tested on stage in the second half of 1977, and it shows: the band plays like a coiled spring, Nieve's keyboards darting and needling around the edges. It's new wave, power pop and punk all at once, with a debt to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones that it doesn't bother hiding. "Pump It Up" is a jittery, pounding rant, "This Year's Girl" and "Lip Service" snap and bite. The lyrics chew on the machinery of mass control and on love affairs gone wrong, and some reviewers thought his view of women was plain nasty. Barney Bubbles' sleeve puts Costello behind a camera on a tripod: the observer, peering back.

It climbed to number four in Britain. The American version, issued by Columbia in May 1978, swapped "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" and "Night Rally" for "Radio Radio" and reached 30 there. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic put it on their year-end lists, and in 2021 Costello revisited it as Spanish Model, with Latin artists singing the songs in Spanish over the Attractions' original tracks.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.