It received favorable reviews, but sold poorly, reaching number 151 on the US record charts during a four-week stay and becoming the lowest-charting Beach Boys album to that point.

[4] About four dozen songs were written for the album, and the label rejected numerous revisions of its track listing before the band presented enough formidable material deemed satisfactory for release.

Many Sunflower outtakes and leftover songs later appeared on subsequent Beach Boys releases, including the follow-up Surf's Up (1971) and the compilation Feel Flows (2021).

The Beach Boys were at their lowest popularity in the late 1960s, and their cultural standing was especially worsened by their public image, which remained incongruous with the "heavier" music of their peers.

[14][nb 1] On April 16, Capitol A&R director Karl Engemaan drafted a letter to band manager Nick Grillo indicating that the group and label were still interested in renewing their contract.

Since the Beach Boys' remained highly popular in the UK, Grillo attempted to secure a foreign, worldwide contract with a European company.

[22][nb 7] Their Capitol contract expired on June 30 with one more album still due,[23] after which the label deleted the Beach Boys' catalog from print, effectively cutting off their royalty flow.

[26][nb 9] Throughout June, the group met with the Berlin-based company Deutsche Grammophon, who were keen to sign the band,[27] but Brian's remarks in the press ultimately thwarted the contract negotiations.

[35] He stated that the group, "including a temporarily rejuvenated Brian", prepared material with "as many songwriting collaborators as possible" as they regarded "the forthcoming album as a make-or-break disc.

[37][nb 12] Shortly before signing with Reprise, the group accumulated enough material for a new album, now titled Sun Flower, and assembled a provisional 14-song acetate for the label.

Badman called it "a dismal farewell" to the decade, "with audience members struggling to reach even a couple of hundred at some shows", forcing most of the dates to be cancelled.

[41][12][nb 14] The company felt that the proposed LP was not strong enough, although they decided to issue two of its tracks as a single, and asked the band to write and record a new batch of songs.

[46] White noted it was "one of the few Beach Boys songs that could honestly be called funky, its tinkly Dixieland piano a perfect foil for the coarse frivolity of the verses, which contain a boorish come-on to the object of one's lowest bump-and-grind fantasies.

[48] The song was named after the sister of one of Johnston's ex-girlfriends[9] and was described by White as "a stroll-tempo devotional to an idealized, red-haired goddess; its stippled use of flutes plus the spacey filtering and compression techniques in the vocal mixes giving the track a celestial grandeur.

"[52] White describes the song as a "commentary on rock indulgence and self-redemption, it was also a wishful scenario regarding both Brian and Dennis Wilson's sporadic personal troubles.

[63] Lenny Waronker, then an A&R executive at Warner Music Group, heard the unfinished tape, and convinced Wilson to finish the track for Sunflower.

Waronker was so impressed with the song's inspired simplicity, that he noted, "If I ever get the opportunity to produce Brian, I'd encourage him to do something that combined the vividness of 'Good Vibrations' with the non-commercial gentleness of 'Cool, Cool Water.

The former compilation also included "Soulful Old Man Sunshine", a collaboration between Brian, Rick Henn (former leader of the Sunrays) and veteran arranger/producer Don Ralke.

"I'm Going Your Way" is a Dennis song about picking up hitchhikers and the sexual intercourse that might follow[20] while "Carnival" (aka "Over the Waves")[74] is a wordless vocal rendition of the standard "When You Are in Love (It's the Loveliest Night of the Year)".

The picture of the band on the front sleeve, featuring all six group members, was taken on the golf course at Dean Martin's Hidden Valley Ranch near Thousand Oaks in Ventura County, California.

[78][full citation needed][nb 17] The inner gatefold spread on the original vinyl LP featured a series of photographs taken by designer/photographer Ed Thrasher at the Warner Bros. studio backlot.

[86] In late June, Brian told Melody Maker that he was thinking about composing the soundtrack to an Andy Warhol film about a "gay surfer".

[90] Biographer David Leaf wrote that the sales numbers were greatly disappointing for the Beach Boys, and that Brian was especially affected: "That, on top of the old, unhealed scars, was a hurt he didn't really begin to get over until 1976.

[56] In his review for Rolling Stone, Jim Miller called it "without doubt the best Beach Boys album in recent memory, a stylistically coherent tour de force", but mused: "It makes one wonder though whether anyone still listens to their music, or could give a shit about it.

"[54] Following Miller's review, several other American magazines published favorable assessments, but as Badman writes, "The damage done by their non-appearance at [the] Monterey [Pop Festival] in 1967 seem[ed] irreversible among rock's opinion-formers.

[107] Paste's Brian Chidester wrote that the album "was, in many respects, their Abbey Road—a lush production that signaled an end to the 1960s, the decade that gave them creative flight.

"[57] Music theorist Daniel Harrison referred to Sunflower as the end of an experimental songwriting and production epoch for the group, one that had begun with 1967's Smiley Smile.

"[92] Peter Ames Carlin summarized: Despite the fact that they were emerging from the darkest years of their commercial and personal lives, the group had produced a collection of songs that projected their utopian fantasies into a modern, adult context.

Club's Noel Murray wrote that the album could be interpreted as the band's response to "the wave of 'sunshine pop' and 'bubblegum' acts that had emerged over the previous couple of years, showing that no one could write and record slick, melodic, harmony-drenched songs quite like The Beach Boys.

[74] In 2021, expanded editions of Sunflower and Surf's Up were packaged within Feel Flows, a box set that includes session highlights, outtakes, and alternate mixes drawn from the two albums.