You’ve probably heard the story before: Brian Wilson hears the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, decides to make the greatest album of all time. He succeeds with an album called Pet Sounds, which Paul showed John, and they started working on Sgt. Pepper’s. Paul shows some of it to Brian, who is already trying to top Pet Sounds with an album called SMiLE (which everyone is rabid with anticipation for), and Brian collapses under the pressure, succumbing to drugs and mental illness. The project is abandoned. The world wouldn’t see SMiLE until he recorded a new version in the late twenty aughts, then pieced together the original tapes in 2011.

But the Beach Boys were under a contract–they had to release something. That release, called Smiley Smile, was a compilation of the most completed songs from the SMiLE sessions (a majority of which wouldn’t appear on the finished project).

Obviously, it failed to live up to the hype of Brian Wilson’s Next Masterpiece, and rightly so–the finished SMiLe was an immaculately composed, lushly arranged symphony of vocal pop. This is a collection of tunes as fractured as Wilson’s mental wellness. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a strange beauty here. After all–fractured genius is still genius, and this record has that in no shortage. The songs that made it to the final project–save Heroes and Villains and Good Vibrations (a Pet Sounds era single, actually)–are worlds away from the later versions. Vegetables here is much goofier, accompanied by a bass guitar, blown bottles, and Paul McCartney chomping celery in time. Wonderful shares the same notes in the same order, but in different rhythms, more grieving than the longing of the 2011 release.

The rest of the songs seem to have obvious reasons for the later absence–they are all wonderfully bizarre, and not at all what you would expect from a songwriter in the throes of his most successful period. She’s Going Bald for example starts with a classic Beach Boys trope: a girl’s lush hair. Until, as you can imagine, it falls out. “It’s too late! It’s too late!” they cry, in dramatic sing-song, accompanied by a carnivalic calliope. Wind Chimes is much more menacing than the calm, porch-on-a-breezy-day number you might expect, instead trafficking in yelps and dissonance.

But disjointed and absurd as it may be, Smiley Smile is some of the finest music the Beach Boys (or anyone) ever put to tape. Were it not for the frenzied anticipation and impossibly high expectations on the record, Smiley Smile would have been just as welcome as any other Beach Boys record. Especially in the weirdness that was 1967.