including 20 tunes in the LP, [Costello] demonstrated his disregard for critics and businessmen". Deeming Get Happy!! "a vibrant work by someone who both understands rock 'n' roll's history and aggressively seeks to shape its future", Hilburn felt it was not as "powerfully framed" as Armed Forces, but "still bristle[d] with the independence that has characterized the British rocker's brief but provocative career." Get Happy!! placed at number two on lists of the best albums of 1980 by NME (behind Joy Division's Closer) and Trouser Press (behind the Clash's London Calling), while the album placed seventh on The Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop music critics' poll, beating out such better selling releases as Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, Stevie Wonder's Hotter than July and Pete Townshend's Empty Glass. Legacy Get Happy!! was a turning point in Costello's career, being the first step away from the angry persona that he had embodied up to that point. He began adding more of himself into the material, later stating: "There was really the need in me to reflect something else: a bit more tenderness, a bit more regret, because you make mistakes in your life and you have to sing about those as well as the things you're very confident or cocky about." Throughout mid-1980, Costello began writing new songs and revising older, unused ones that would reflect this new form of thinking, debuting a few during live performances during the summer. His next album, 1981's Trust, would be envisioned by the artist as combining the "melodic lushness" of Armed Forces and the "rhythmic drive" of Get Happy!!. Gouldstone further comments that the album marked the beginning of Costello's "most fruitful period" that yielded the "trilogy of magnificent albums": Get Happy!!, Trust and Imperial Bedroom (1982). In 2019, Squeeze guitarist Chris Difford named the album as an inspiration, stating, "Get Happy!! was a big album for me. I just loved the lyrics. I loved the performances on that record. It's brilliant." Costello would produce Squeeze's 1981 album East Side Story. Retrospective appraisal Retrospective reviews have been very positive, and Get Happy!! has since been considered one of Costello's best works. Writing in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, critic Rob Sheffield dubbed it a "tour de force", a sentiment echoed by senior AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who hailed Get Happy!! as more than a "genre exercise". Finding the inconsistent quality of