Smile (The Beach Boys Album)

Smile (The Beach Boys Album)

Smile (occasionally typeset with partial capitalization as SMiLE) is a partially recorded concept album by the Beach Boys originally intended to be the follow-up album to Pet Sounds. Due to circumstance, Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson abandoned large portions of the session output he recorded from May 1966 to May 1967 and recorded the wildly different Smiley Smile album in its place. During the years Smile remained unavailable, it had come to be regarded as the most famous unreleased album of all time.

The project was re-imagined and released by Wilson in 2004 as Brian Wilson Presents Smile though Wilson himself has stated that the Smile of 2004 differed substantially from what the Smile of the mid-1960s would have been. During the 37 years from its cancellation to the release of Wilson's version, Smile had acquired considerable mystique, and bootlegged tracks from the album circulated widely among Beach Boys collectors. Many of the tracks which were originally recorded for Smile eventually found their way onto subsequent Beach Boys albums.

On October 31, 2011, The Smile Sessions was released featuring an approximation of what the completed album may have sounded like, the first disc being reconstructed to largely follow the template of the 2004 Brian Wilson album. Along with this approximation, a sequence of completed surviving recordings, along with many unreleased session highlights and outtakes were made available through a box-set. It received unanimous critical acclaim. In 2012, it was ranked number 381 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. In 2013, it won the Best Historical Album award at the 55th Grammy Awards.