I’m on a Montréal rooftop on a brisk September evening, and I really have to pee. I’ve spent the past hour mingling and drinking, waiting for a duo I’ve been told is the hottest rising act in Canada to emerge onstage. It’s now five minutes to go-time, but I don’t think I can hold it any longer. I make my apologies and rush down the stairs of the Ubisoft building, hoping to make it to the bathroom on the fourth floor and back before the apparently much-awaited secret show begins. Almost there, I round the final corner—and run directly into a double-necked guitar. I look up at its owner to apologize, and am promptly rendered speechless.
Looming over me are two seven-foot-something beings—not people, beings—covered head-to-toe in polka dots, their massive cardboard papier-mâché heads staring down at me like I’m the one from another planet. Before I can even recover enough to squeak out a “sorry,” the long-nosed, polygon-hatted, white-faced-and-black-clothed guitarist (who I have since learned goes by Khn) gurgles an electronically-mangled hello and robotically raises their right arm, causing their black sleeve to fall just enough to reveal the line where the white paint covering their hand ends and their actual skin begins. Intelligently, I stammer “I’m- uh- bathroom?” The one with the black-painted cylindrical cardboard head (named Klek, apparently) nods kindly at me, their bulbous dangling nose swinging as they point down the hall and once again make a computerized noise that cannot possibly qualify as language but could not be mistaken for anything else. I nod rapidly back like a bobblehead and stumble over an apology, then absolutely book it, the aliens’ human handlers glaring at me before continuing to guide their intergalactic overlords up to the rooftop stage. I get to the bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and say out loud: “What the fuck?”
A few months later, a friend sent me a link to a new KEXP session alongside the text “Have you seen this???” When the thumbnail finally loaded, I almost dropped my phone. It was them: Angine de Poitrine from the Pop Montréal rooftop, in all their polka-dotted glory. After I recovered from the sense-memory of squatting repeatedly in a crowd of a hundred people with my hands above my head in a triangle formation, it all clicked together: Chris Sanley from KEXP was next to me at the show that night, and as soon as that truly otherworldly set finished, she turned to me and said, “I need to book these guys.” And book them she did. The nearly 28-minute session has since gone viral, racking up almost 7 million views in about two months. Angine de Poitrine had officially hit the—well, not the mainstream, exactly, but the zeitgeist.
Today, the Québécois pair have released their first album since their recent brush with fame—Vol. II, the followup to 2024’s Vol. I—and it’s a doozy. Even if I hadn’t seen them live and in-person last September, I imagine I’d realize roughly three seconds into the first track, “Fabienk,” that the music I’m listening to could not possibly be Earth-bound. The anonymous, self-declared “mantra-rock Dada Pythago-Cubiste” pair serves up a 30-plus-minute jazz-funk-meets-math-rock acid trip, filled to the brim with hypnotic drumwork and looping guitar microtones. They’ve been compared to everyone: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Miles Davis, Genesis, John Scofield. Somehow, all of them are right and none of them are.
There are no words to be found anywhere on the record; any language-adjacent noises are completely nonsensical, chewed up by some sort of talkbox-esque machinery and spat out with galactic fervor. The only communication here is musical (and also, likely, telepathic). They’ve said as much: “The goal is to use these notes like any others. Not as decoration but as the language itself.” But if you’re having a hard time recognizing the notes in question, don’t worry, that’s by design—Khn plays a ridiculous Stratocaster-esque half-electric half-bass with additional hand-carved frets allowing for notes that simply do not exist in basic chromatic scales, a 24-TET tuning made up of quarter tones and madness.
Say what you will about the clearly extraterrestrial Khn and Klek, but their musicianship simply cannot be called into question. How Klek’s drumset survives each set is beyond me; he pummels it into oblivion, somehow evoking sheer insanity while keeping perfect time. And Khn’s guitar-and-bass work is masterful, coaxing impossible tones from his instrument like a snake charmer, and doing it all at rapid speed. The pair’s sense of tempo alone is enough to boggle the mind. Their polyrhythms are those of a lunatic, but not in the sense that they’re all over the place; their time signatures remain firmly grounded in the steady thrum of a loop pedal. That’s the wildest part: their ability to spend six minutes in the exact same structure while making each measure feel new. They’re madman magicians, pulling rhythmic brain-twisters and earworm hooks from within the same beat the way Harry Houdini pulled rabbits from hats. It’s all musical sleight-of-hand in the end; now you see the architecture of a track, now you don’t.
With only one song (the constantly-reconstructing psych groover “Sarniezz”) falling below the four-minute mark, Angine de Poitrine give themselves plenty of room to play on Vol. II. Opener “Fabienk” is a party that feverishly wiggles up and down frets with reckless abandon; “Yor Zarad” is all angles, Klek’s staccato drums poking into Khn’s yowling solos; “Angor” starts small and builds into a militant march through a riff-heavy atmosphere. “Utzp” pulses on an Eastern European clown-car polka beat, like some forgotten soundtrack to a particularly experimental Charlie Chaplin flick, before melting into brain-numbing guitar lines, and its false endings keep you on your toes throughout. And there’s something utterly addictive about the central riff of “Mata Zyklek,” which has occupied no small portion of my brain since I first heard it in Montréal.
Across roughly 35 minutes, Angine de Poitrine thrash wildly throughout space and time, carving headbangers out of microtonal polyrhythms—the rare band that would appease long-time music theory geeks and casual “look man, I just want to vibe” listeners at once. It’s math-rock made for the moshpit. As Khn put it in a recent interview, “My mission statement has always been to try and bring fresh musical ideas out there, to stimulate the brain with elements of surprise while keeping things somewhat simple. And I’m willing to bet my right hand that Klek’s mission statement will be about making those ideas danceable.” Well, mission accomplished. Never before has technical mastery felt so fun. As carefully constructed as each track is, there isn’t a single moment that feels cold or calculated. Their songs are bullet trains that perpetually feel a split-second away from veering wildly off-track, despite never actually coming close to disaster at all. Again: sleight-of-hand. But Khn and Klek are so unique in their approach and confident in their own artistry that you miss the tell every time. [Les Cassettes Magiques]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
