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AllMusic
The A.V. Club	(favorable)
Blender
Robert Christgau	A−
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
MusicHound	3.5/5
Pitchfork Media	8.9/10
The Rolling Stone Album Guide

Sunflower is the 16th studio album by American rock group The Beach Boys, released in August 1970, and their first on Reprise Records. The album was met with an enthusiastic critical reception which contrasted with unexpectedly poor sales, reaching only No. 151 on US record charts during a four-week stay, and becoming the lowest charting Beach Boys album at that point. It was preceded by the similarly unsuccessful singles "Add Some Music to Your Day" and "Slip On Through"; later followed up with "Tears in the Morning" and "Forever". In the UK, the album performed better, peaking at No. 29.

As the fifth consecutive album to give production credit to "the Beach Boys", it continued a pattern established in Friends (1968) with major songwriting contributions split between brothers Brian and Dennis Wilson. Bandmates Al Jardine, Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, and Mike Love also contributed to its writing. Its sessions begun in the midst of legal battles with Capitol Records in January 1969 and ended 19 months later — after the group signed with Reprise, who continuously rejected several variations of the album's track listing and contents. Eventually, the group presented the label with enough formidable material deemed satisfactory for release.

In 2003, Sunflower was voted 380 in Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 1997, it was voted 66 in The Guardian's "100 Best Albums Ever".

Following their last album, 20/20, Brian Wilson proposed that the group change their name from "the Beach Boys" to "the Beach", reasoning for the simple fact that the band members were now grown men. Going to the effort of acquiring a contract which would declare a five-way agreement to officially rename the group, engineer Stephen Desper reported, "They all just kind of shrugged and said, 'Aw, come on, Brian, we don't wanna do that. That's how the public knows us, man.' And that was it. He put the paper on the piano and it stayed there until I picked it up and took it away."

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