Surf's Up

The seventeenth studio album came out on Brother, Reprise and Warner Bros. It followed Sunflower, which had been the worst-selling record in the group's history. Its manager Jack Rieley wanted the group to shed its image, and he pushed for topical lyrics, the end of matching stage uniforms and Carl Wilson as official leader. He gave the project the working title Landlocked, to mark a line between the striped-shirt past and new songs. The album was recorded between January and July 1971 and credited to the Beach Boys as producers, with Stephen Desper as chief engineer and mixer. Brian Wilson was less involved than on Sunflower, and Bruce Johnston recalled how strange it felt to be doing vocal arrangements to sound like the Beach Boys when they were the Beach Boys. The vocal arrangements are thinner than on Sunflower.

Carl wrote his first major songs for it, Long Promised Road and Feel Flows, and recorded them almost entirely himself. Mike Love and Al Jardine took up the new tone with Student Demonstration Time, a reworking of Leiber and Stoller's Riot in Cell Block Number 9, and Don't Go Near the Water. Johnston wrote Disney Girls (1957), Brian and Rieley wrote A Day in the Life of a Tree, about a tree dying of pollution, with Rieley singing lead, and Brian's Til I Die had occupied him since mid-1970. Two songs by Dennis Wilson, 4th of July and Wouldn't It Be Nice to Live Again, were left off. The title song, written for Smile, was finished in June 1971 when Brian allowed Carl and Rieley to complete it, and with that done Landlocked was renamed. It was the first album on which the band printed the lyrics on the sleeve. The cover is a painting based on the sculpture End of the Trail.

It reached number 29 in the US, their best placing for a record of new songs since 1967, and number 15 in Britain. Of the two US singles only Long Promised Road charted, at number 89 when it was reissued with Til I Die. Time called it one of the most imaginatively produced LPs since All Things Must Pass. A Rolling Stone writer described a remarkable comeback, while Robert Christgau was less impressed. Paul McCartney said in 1971 that the album was good. Johnston later called the record a false reflection of the band. NME ranked it number 96 in 1974 and number 46 in 1993, and Pitchfork put it at number 61 among the albums of the 1970s, with Dominique Leone writing that it practically defines flawed greatness. The Feel Flows box set of 2021 collected sessions and outtakes from this album and Sunflower.