Most of the backing tracks were produced between August and December 1966, but few vocals were ever recorded, and the album's structure was never finalized.

Numerous issues, including legal entanglements with Capitol Records, Wilson's uncompromising perfectionism and mental instabilities, as well as Parks' withdrawal from the project in early 1967, prevented the album's completion and release.

The lead single would have been ' Heroes and Villains', a Western musical comedy, or ' Vega-Tables', a satire of physical fitness. It was a concept album that was planned to feature word paintings, tape manipulation, elaborate vocal arrangements, experiments with musical acoustics, and comedic interludes, with influences drawn from mysticism, pre-rock and roll pop, doo-wop, jazz, ragtime, musique concrète, classical, American history, poetry, and cartoons. Wilson touted Smile as a 'teenage symphony to God' to surpass Pet Sounds. The album was produced and almost entirely composed by Brian Wilson with guest lyricist and assistant arranger Van Dyke Parks, both of whom conceived the project as a riposte to the British sensibilities that had dominated popular music of the era. Over the next four decades, few of the original Smile tracks were officially released, and the project came to be regarded as the most 'legendary' unreleased album in popular music history. Instead, after a year of recording, the album was shelved and the group released a downscaled version, Smiley Smile, in September 1967.

It was to be a 12-track LP that drew from over 50 hours of interchangeable sound fragments, similar to the group's 1966 single ' Good Vibrations'. Smile (stylized as SMiLE) is an unfinished album by the American rock band the Beach Boys that was planned to follow their 11th studio album Pet Sounds (1966).

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