Holland

by

The Beach Boys

Holland is the 19th studio album by American rock band the Beach Boys, released January 8, 1973 on Brother/Reprise. It is their first album recorded without Bruce Johnston since 1965, their second with Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, and their final studio album created under the de facto leadership of Carl Wilson and manager Jack Rieley. The LP was originally packaged with a bonus EP, Mount Vernon and Fairway, which consisted of a 12-minute fairy tale written and produced by Brian and Carl Wilson.

Per its title, Holland was recorded over the summer of 1972 at a barn in Baambrugge, near Amsterdam, where the band members and their entourage had decamped for several months in the pursuit of creative inspiration. Recording the album was an unprecedented and extremely costly venture, as the group had commissioned their engineers to renovate the barn, which had housed an existing studio, using components from the band's studio in Los Angeles that were dismantled, shipped to the Netherlands in crates, and then reassembled. Ultimately, only the album's basic tracks were recorded in the Netherlands, with the band finishing off the record in late 1972 at Village Recorders in Los Angeles. Total expenses were estimated at $250,000 (equivalent to $1.82 million in 2023).

Holland received generally favorable reviews and came to be viewed by many fans as the Beach Boys' last great album. It peaked at number 36 in the US and number 20 in the UK, and it produced two singles: "Sail On, Sailor" and "California Saga/California". Subsequently, the band recorded little in the studio for the next two years. Instead, they released the live album The Beach Boys in Concert (1973), and did not follow up with another studio album until 15 Big Ones (1976). In 2022, an expanded version of Holland was packaged within the compilation Sail On Sailor – 1972.