The Beach Boys have announced a new box set celebrating their mid-’70s era. We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years reframes 1976–77 as one of the most revealing and creatively restless chapters of the band’s evolution. We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years is out February 13 via Capitol/UMe and is available for pre-order now.
With the announcement comes a previously unreleased outtake from the Love You sessions, the collection’s title track, “We Gotta Groove.”
Co-produced by acclaimed producer/mixing engineer James Sáez and longtime Beach Boys historian Howie Edelson, with artist direction from band archivist Alan Boyd, We Gotta Groove is an expansive 73-track collection containing 35 unreleased and 22 newly mixed tracks. The release is anchored around a newly remastered edition of The Beach Boys Love You and the album sessions, the first-ever official release of the long-shelved Adult/Child, and outtakes and alternates from the transitional 15 Big Ones sessions.
We Gotta Groove presents the majority of the album sessions across three LPs with additional outtakes, alternate mixes and demos on three CDs, which also include the same tracks as the vinyl. The albums are packaged in a 12.75” x 12.75” slipcase emblazoned with a picture of the stunning stained-glass window that hung in Brother Studio and features a 40-page booklet with liner notes by co-producer Edelson that draws on new and archival interviews with all of The Beach Boys and the Brother Studio engineer team of Stephen Moffitt, Earle Mankey and John Hanlon. The booklet is filled with a slew of rare photos, tape box images and artifacts of the era and a complete sessionography.
The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles will celebrate the historic release with a special evening on Thursday, February 12. Compilation producers Edelson and Sáez will be in conversation with Moffitt, Mankey, and Hanlon, marking the trio’s first reunion since these recordings were made 50 years ago.
Following the unexpected success of two back-to-back Top 10 greatest hits, The Beach Boys filled sold-out stadiums and arenas across the U.S. Amidst this era, Brian Wilson returned to songwriting and producing, working from the band’s new home base at a former X-rated movie theater at 1454 5th St. in Santa Monica, California, that they christened Brother Studio. All five principal members — Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine —contributed to a series of raw, surprising, and vulnerable recordings.
The first disc of We Gotta Groove features The Beach Boys Love You, newly remastered from the original 1977 mix, alongside 10 period outtakes. Recorded largely at Brother Studio from October 1976 to January 1977 with Brian behind the console and playing most of the instruments, Love You strips the group to analog synthesizers and close-mic’d vocals.
Though divisive among critics and fans at release, Brian frequently cited Love You as his favorite Beach Boys record, calling it “the best album we ever made.” It has since become a cult classic. R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck singled it out as his favorite Beach Boys album. As Edelson writes in the liner notes, “Upon the initial release of The Beach Boys Love You, non-believers picked up on the D.I.Y. punk ethos from the Lower East Side all the way to the hipper enclaves across Europe. Today, Brian Wilson’s left field use of keyboards in the 1970s is considered to be an early influence for 1980’s New Wave, Synth Pop, and New Romantic record makers.”
The 1977 recording Adult/Child was the intended follow-up, but its release was ultimately vetoed. After circulating for decades through collectors’ tapes and bootlegs, We Gotta Groove presents the near-mythical material in a coherent album sequence for the first time, supplemented by new 2025 backing-track mixes and session highlights. “I wrote a song for Frank Sinatra once called ‘Still I Dream Of It.’ He didn’t say yes to the song. It was a beautiful song about loneliness and hope. The song ended up on an album named Adult/Child, which was filled with those kinds of songs. It was a Beach Boys album that never came out,” Brian remarked in an interview.
We Gotta Groove also offers a new perspective on the 1976 album 15 Big Ones through its wealth of studio material. Recorded mostly between March through May 1976, the album was the band’s first to credit Brian with sole production credits since 1966’s Pet Sounds. Its release was accompanied by the controversial “Brian’s Back!” campaign, which was intended to advertise his return to full creative command. 15 Big Ones produced the major hit “Rock and Roll music” and returned the band to the U.S. Top 10. We Gotta Groove presents a variety of covers that didn’t make the final cut, including “Mony Mony,” “Running Bear,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll, “On Broadway,” and “Sea Cruise.”
Order The Beach Boys’s We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years now.