Angine de Poitrine are the most thrilling Canadian mystery since David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. The anonymous Québécois duo spent years gigging in total obscurity across the Great White North—at least until that KEXP session at France’s Rennes Festival last December went completely nuclear online.
They appear as “space-time voyagers” named Klek de Poitrine and Khn de Poitrine, performing in paper-mâché masks and identical monochromatic outfits. The sound is essentially danceable math-rock, played with a stripped-back setup of muffled drums and a guitar that sounds like it’s being tortured in a very specific, microtonal way. It’s hard to classify—they call themselves a “Mantra-Rock Dada Pythagorean-Cubist Orchestra,” which is a lot to take in. Actually, it feels more like they snuck a double-necked guitar onto the set of Beetlejuice and just started playing.
Misryoum reporting notes that their viral reach is legitimately bizarre, consistently outperforming legacy acts on major performance platforms. A copy of their debut, Vol. I, recently traded for over $1,500 on the secondhand market. Even Rick Beato felt compelled to make a video about them, titled “Please STOP Sending Me This.” The tour dates are vanishing in minutes. It’s a fluke, or maybe it’s just the audience finally getting tired of the usual stuff.
Their sound is a weird collision of influences that definitely shouldn’t be popular. You hear the hypnotic churn of King Gizzard, sure, but then it dives into the ’70s French zeuhl scene—think Magma or Art Zoyd—or the jerky, outsider experimentation of Renaldo and the Loaf. There’s a faint scent of old coffee in the room while I’m listening to this; it feels academic and dusty, but then they hit a groove that makes you want to move. It’s the kind of dorkery that usually stays in basements.
The first three tracks on Vol. II finally deliver polished studio versions of that KEXP set. It’s not just noise, though—there’s a loop pedal acting as a third member, keeping everything locked to a pulse. They aren’t jumping around like Dillinger Escape Plan; they’re more like Meshuggah, setting a meter and then messing with your head using syncopation and rhythmic illusions. It’s actually pretty precise.
Khn’s riffs are massive polygons, spanning huge gaps of time before they even resolve—or don’t. “Sarniezz” is a simple 6/8, but it feels like it’s collapsing in on itself because the melody takes four bars to cycle. It’s a telekinetic bond, really. Twenty years of playing together, they claim—which explains why they seem to be reading each other’s minds, even if the rest of us are still trying to figure out what just happened.