Blood & Chocolate

After King of America, the band returned for a record made as a group playing together. Colin Fairley engineered. The musicians set up in one room and played through monitors instead of headphones, mostly on the first take and never needing more than three. Costello said they played as loud as they did on stage. He also said that anything fancy made the band sound as if it were wearing boxing gloves. Bruce Thomas and Pete Thomas both played saxophone, Nick Lowe added acoustic guitar to five songs, and Cait O'Riordan sang on two. The cover painting is credited to Eamonn Singer, one of Costello's aliases.

It reached number 16 in the UK and 84 in the US, and Diffuser calls it his lowest-charting album on both sides of the Atlantic. It went gold in Britain. Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times called it the album fans had waited seven years for. Christgau gave it an A-minus and wrote that its two longest songs showed sustained vision. The record ended Costello's US Columbia period and was the last Lowe produced for him.