Friends is the fourteenth studio album by the American rock band the Beach Boys, released on June 24, 1968, through Capitol Records. The album is characterized by its calm and peaceful atmosphere, which contrasted the prevailing music trends of the time, and by its brevity, with five of its 12 tracks running less than two minutes long. It initially sold poorly, peaking at number 126 on the Billboard charts, the group's lowest U.S. chart performance at that point, although it reached number 13 in the UK.

Friends was recorded primarily at Brian Wilson's home but is a departure from the lo-fi production style of previous efforts. The album's sessions lasted from February to April 1968 at a time when the band's finances were rapidly diminishing. Despite crediting production to "the Beach Boys", Wilson actively led the entire project, later referring to it as his second unofficial solo album (the first being 1966's Pet Sounds). Some of the songs were inspired by the group's recent involvement with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Transcendental Meditation practice. It was the first album to feature songs from Dennis Wilson.

One single was issued from the album: "Friends", a waltz that reached number 47 in the U.S. and number 25 in the UK. Its B-side was the Dennis co-write "Little Bird". In May, the group scheduled a national tour with the Maharishi, but it was canceled after five shows due to low ticket sales and the Maharishi's subsequent withdrawal. A standalone single, "Do It Again", was released in July. It reached the U.S. top twenty, became their second number one hit in the UK, and was included in foreign pressings of Friends.

Friends received favorable reviews in the music press, but like their records since Smiley Smile (1967), the album's simplicity divided critics and fans. Despite the failure of a collaborative tour with the Maharishi, the group remained supporters of him and his teachings. Dennis contributed more songs on later Beach Boys albums, eventually culminating in a solo record, 1977's Pacific Ocean Blue. In 2018, session highlights, outtakes, and alternate takes were released for the compilation Wake the World: The Friends Sessions.

In September and December 1967, the Beach Boys released Smiley Smile and Wild Honey, respectively. Music fans were generally disappointed that the band twice failed to deliver on the hype surrounding their unreleased album Smile, which was advertised as the follow-up to the sophistication of Pet Sounds and "Good Vibrations" (both 1966). Instead, the group were making a deliberate choice to produce music that was simpler and less refined. Commenting on Wild Honey, Mike Love said the band made a conscious decision to be "completely out of the mainstream for what was going on at that time, which was all hard rock/psychedelic music. [The album] just didn’t have anything to do with what was going on."

Although Wild Honey charted higher than Smiley Smile in the US, it was ultimately the group's lowest-selling album to that point. Apart from a two-week U.S. tour in November 1967, the band was not performing live during this period, and their finances were rapidly diminishing. That same month, the group stopped wearing their longtime striped-shirt stage uniforms in favor of matching white, polyester suits that were similar to a Las Vegas show band.

Dennis Wilson, Al Jardine, and Mike Love were among the many rock musicians who discovered the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi following the Beatles' public endorsement of his Transcendental Meditation technique in August 1967. In December, the touring group attended a lecture by the Maharishi at a UNICEF Variety Gala in Paris and were moved by the simplicity and effectiveness of his meditation process as a means to obtaining inner peace. They were invited to meet the Maharishi in his hotel room the same day, and according to Brian, "they came back and [Carl was] just floating. ... it got to me through him." He recalled that he had "already been initiated" beforehand, but "for some ridiculous reason I hadn't followed through with it, and when you don't follow through with something you can get all clogged up. ... we're all meditating together now."

In a January 1968 interview, Brian stated that the group was unsure what their next production would be, but that "it won't be very long now until I come up with a song about meditation. It shouldn't be more than a month." He also expressed an interest in "pull[ing] out of conventional sound making and get[ting] into sounds that have never been made before ever." In early February, the group performed scattered gigs in the U.S. with Buffalo Springfield. The Beach Boys attended the Maharishi's public appearances in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, after which he invited Love to join the Beatles at his training seminar in Rishikesh in northern India. Love stayed there from February 28 to March 15. In his absence, the rest of the group began recording the album that would become Friends.