Wild Honey by The Beach Boys

Wild Honey, the Beach Boys' thirteenth studio album, came out on Capitol on December 18, 1967, and it's the sound of a band stepping away from whatever everybody else was doing. Cut between September and November, with production credited to the group as a whole, it keeps the homemade, lo-fi feel of Smiley Smile but points it at soul, with Motown and Stax as the guiding lights. Brian Wilson hands part of the control booth to Carl, and Mike Love is back as Brian's main co-writer for the first time since 1965.

Stung by critics who had written them off as gutless choirboys, they set out to sound like a lean, self-contained rock band. It sold worse than anything they'd made before and most reviewers shrugged, but time has been kinder: it is now credited with foreshadowing the back-to-basics turn of Dylan and the Beatles, and Rolling Stone ranked it 410 among its 500 greatest albums in 2020.

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