Wild Honey is the thirteenth studio album by the American rock band the Beach Boys, released on December 18, 1967, by Capitol Records.

Wild Honey presaged a back-to-basics approach that was subsequently adopted by the Beach Boys' contemporaries, including Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and it is credited with pioneering the DIY pop genre.

The Beach Boys' previous LP Smiley Smile, released in September 1967, peaked at number 41 on US Billboard charts[2] for what was their worst performing album to date.

[3] A controversy involving whether the band was to be taken as a serious rock group had critics and fans divided, as journalist Gene Sculatti wrote at the time, "the California sextet is simultaneously hailed as genius incarnate and derided as the archetypical pop music copouts.

"[7] Upon their return to Los Angeles, in September, the group decided that the recordings were not suitable for release and attempted to redo the project as a live-in-the-studio album.

[19] Unlike the band's previous R&B outings—which typically consisted of Chuck Berry-derived riffs—most of Wild Honey drew on the emotive soul music associated with the Motown and Stax Records labels.

[21] Edwin Faust from Stylus Magazine wrote that its music focuses "simply on catchy hooks, snappy melodies and a straight-up boogie-woogie feel".

[22] Lenny Kaye, writing for Wondering Sound, felt that its "R&B leanings" may be attributed to Mike Love and Carl Wilson's vocal roles on the album.

[19] Musicologist Daniel Harrison writes that its "simple songs" lack the "enigmatic weirdness" and "virtuosic mesmerizers" present in Smiley Smile, although they feature the same production approach and similar core instrumental combo of organ, honky-tonk piano, and electric bass.

"[19][nb 3] Harrison describes Wild Honey as a self-conscious attempt by the Beach Boys to "regroup" themselves as a rock band in opposition to their more orchestral affairs of the past.

[34][35] Biographer Byron Preiss wrote that it "epitomizes" the album's "simple energy",[36] while magazine editor Gene Sculatti says it "achieves a Miracles style smoothness via a Bobby Goldsboro-type song".

[19] Inexplicably, when the alternate "Mama Says" version of "Vegetables" was released, Van Dyke Parks' songwriting credit was not honored, and instead Love was listed as the song's only co-writer.

A solo recording of Brian performing the Smile song "Surf's Up" was lost and rediscovered several decades later at the end of the multi-track reel for "Country Air".

The band also recorded cover versions of the Box Tops hit "The Letter" (1967), Clint Ballard Jr.'s "The Game of Love" (1965), and the Beatles' "With a Little Help from My Friends" (1967), as well as Johnston's demo for "Bluebirds over the Mountain".

[48] The New York Observer's Ron Hart said that the significance of the Beach Boys covering "The Letter" as sung by Alex Chilton is "simply beyond comprehension [...] for that special kind of music nerd.

"[16] On October 13, 1967, Capitol announced that the Beach Boys' next release would be Wild Honey and offered its track listing, even though some of the songs had yet to be recorded at that point.

[49] The image on the front of the Wild Honey sleeve is a small section of an elaborate stained-glass window that adorned Brian's home in Bel Air.

[50] It was released at a contrast to the psychedelic music that occupied the record charts, and in competition with the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour and the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request.

"[19] Rolling Stone reviewed that the Beach Boys regained their better judgement after the "disaster" of Smiley Smile, although their use of "pre-existing ideas and idioms" on Wild Honey is less satisfactory and original than their earlier work: "It's kind of amusing that the Beach Boys are suddenly re-discovering rhythm and blues five years after the Beatles and Stones had brought it all back home".

"[4] In a column for Esquire, Robert Christgau wrote that the album "epitomizes Brian Wilson", including the song "I'd Love Just Once to See You", which "expresses perfectly his quiet, thoughtful, sentimental artistic personality.

"[57] Billboard welcomed the band's return to form after the "avant-garde" Smiley Smile, but was critical of "How She Boogalooed It" as "far below the group's quality" and predicted that "I'd Love Just Once to See You" would not receive airplay.

"[56] Like Smiley Smile, Wild Honey was later reevaluated by fans and critics who highlighted the record for its simplicity and charm, particularly after the LP was reissued by Warner Bros. in 1974.

[68] In his 1971 review of Surf's Up, Rolling Stone's Arthur Schmidt referred to Wild Honey as "a masterpiece", "the most underrated" of the band's "post-surfer LPs", and "the last time they truly rocked their asses off, one cut after another.

He argued that, "almost without a bad second", the album conveys "the troubled innocence of the Beach Boys through a time of attractive but perilous psychedelic sturm und drang.

Wonder, though, never sang odes to clean air and refreshing wind or made boyish jokes about seeing a naked woman or brushing one's teeth.

[77] In a negative review, Pitchfork critic Spencer Owen said only "one or two" songs succeed and the majority of Wild Honey is "not pretty" because of its R&B vein as "interpreted by white surfer boys", including "a Stevie Wonder cover sung with as much faux-soul as Carl Wilson could have possibly mustered".

[78] Noel Gallagher, who considers the Beach Boys to be "the most vastly overrated band in the history of popular culture", named "How She Boogalooed It" among the group's only "six good tunes".

[80] Uncut's David Cavanaugh remarked that despite the poor critical response afforded to the album at the time of its release, Wild Honey heralded rock trends of the late 1960s and effectively pioneered "a post-psychedelic music while the Summer of Love was still in full swing.

"[81] Author Mike Segretto echoed, "Ten days before Dylan got all the credit for popping the psychedelic balloon with John Wesley Harding, the Beach Boys had done it first with Wild Honey.

The set also includes numerous session highlights, alternate takes, and live renditions of Wild Honey tracks in addition to other unreleased material recorded during the Smiley Smile and Lei'd in Hawaii era.