Who Are Angine de Poitrine?

If you’ve been online for the last two months, especially if you’re engaged in music-related communities online, you’ve probably heard of the bizarre Quebecois prog rock duo Angine de Poitrine. Their emergence into the zeitgeist has been meteoric. It’s due in part to a now-viral KEXP performance that has racked up over 11 million views on YouTube since it was released in early February of this year. From just the thumbnail, you can tell there’s something strange and unique going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi-9wS1so

Angine de Poitrine formed officially in 2019 in Saguenay, Quebec, but the duo have known each other since they were teenagers. Their first album, Vol. I, was released in 2024, and their follow up, Vol. II, was released in early April of this year on the heels of their new-found virility. The duo, who operate using the stage names Khn de Poitrine and Klek de Poitrine, are completely anonymous, and they maintain this secrecy by outfitting themselves in outrageous uniforms of head-to-toe polka dots. Beyond that, they both wear over the top paper maches masks. Khn de Poitrine, the band’s guitarist, wears a white mask with black polka dots that is shaped like an upside down triangle with a flat bottom where the downward-facing point should be. The front of Khn’s mask is outfitted with a very, very long nose and golden dollar signs over the eyes. They also have golden hair, made of some kind of rope, that makes up long, thin golden twists, and a thicker, braided goatee. Klek, the band’s drummer, wears a black mask with white polka dots. Their mask also has a long nose, but their’s flops uncomfortably down and around when they play like a proboscis monkey’s nose. The rest of the mask is shaped like a cylinder with a rounded top. It features golden diamond shapes for the eyes, and a third larger diamond shape on the very top of it.

To add to the oddity, their music is unusual as well. As music fans who know more about time signatures and what the word ‘microtonal’ means than I do will tell you, Angine de Poitrine’s music takes shapes not so commonly seen in Western music. Guitarist Khn plays a custom double-necked guitar, an instrument that’s a marrying of a guitar and a bass, with the inclusion of microtonal frets. Microtonal frets are the inclusion of additional frets along the neck of a guitar to allow the player to access tones that fall between half steps.

However, despite everything that should, in-theory, put Angine de Poitrine outside of the mainstream, they’ve broken through and it’s amazing to see. I think that one of the major reasons for their newfound popularity is because despite all of the pretentious math rock, Angine de Poitrine’s music is really, really fun. On top of incredible technical prowess, it’s really fun to dance along to the band’s music. Their music feels good to listen to, and even when they’re playing with odd time signatures and instrumentation that isn’t familiar to me, there’s something very compelling to what I’m hearing. Plus, as pop songs seem to get shorter and more repetitive, it’s a breath of fresh air to encounter music like Angine de Poitrine’s, and artists like them as well. To be unafraid to be so weird and true to their vision is really inspiring, and very necessary in a moment when AI music is becoming more and more prevalent.