Iron Butterfly is an American rock band formed in San Diego, California, in 1966. They are best known for the 1968 hit "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", providing a dramatic sound that led the way towards the development of hard rock and heavy metal music. Although their heyday was the late 1960s, the band has been reformed with various members with varying levels of success with no new recordings since 1975. Their second album, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1968), remains a best-seller, and Iron Butterfly was the first group to receive an in-house platinum album award from Atlantic Records.
According to music critic Manish Agarwal of Time Out, "Iron Butterfly blended hard rock with ordinate, acid-friendly textures." Mark Deming of AllMusic stated that they were one of the first musical groups to fuse the two styles in this way, and described their sound as a "blend of trippy musical exploration and open-ended jams with a hard, distorted attack".
