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Ned Flanders-themed hardcore band Okilly Dokilly turns the nice neighbor nasty

Ned Flanders-themed hardcore band Okilly Dokilly turns the nice neighbor nasty

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Ned Flanders is the nice, nerdy, and outwardly normal neighborino, but as multiple Simpsons episodes have shown, he has a dark side. It’s that dark side that Flanders-themed hardcore band Okilly Dokilly are presumably channelling with their first album, Howdilly Doodilly, released earlier this month.

Each of the songs on the 13-track record takes its title and lyrics from Ned himself, lead singer Head Ned roaring Simpsons quotes over blastbeats, breakdowns, and beefy riffs provided by Red Ned, Bled Ned, and the rest of the band. The video for first single “White Wine Spritzer” shows the Neds at their angriest, destroying a Simpsons-esque living room under the influence of a very small amount of alcohol, before burying a mustachioed member in a shallow grave.

The song’s typical of the rest of the album, starting slow and building to a crescendiddly-o. The inclusion of a synth gives Okilly Dokilly’s hardcore a jerky, post-punk vibe, one that the real Ned probably wouldn’t like very much — unless he’d just come home to find his house rebuilt by idiots and needed to work out some of his rage in a circle pit.

Flanders worship is a good hook, and it saves on writing lyrics, but Okilly Dokilly certainly aren’t the first hardcore outfit to mine the Simpsons for naming ideas. By far the most famous is Fall Out Boy, a nod to Radioactive Man’s sidekick, played by Milhouse. Milhouse himself seems to have been the inspiration for scores of bands, too, Bart’s nerdy friend apparently striking a chord with punk kids the world over. TV newsreader Kent Brockman also loaned his name to a German powerviolence group active at the turn of the millennium — although that band focused less on dropping references and more on raging against the machine.