Angine de Poitrine

Dave Grohl watched a video of Angine de Poitrine and, by his own account, lost his mind a little. “So completely insane,” he reportedly said. “So completely bonkers, dude.” This is not the kind of endorsement you manufacture. This is the kind that happens when someone stumbles onto something genuinely strange and cannot help themselves.

The Quebec duo has been performing since 2019, operating in a zone that is technically math rock but that label barely covers it. Khn de Poitrine and Klek de Poitrine, both performing in elaborate papier-mâché masks and costumes that suggest ceremonial performance art more than band imagery, play microtonal guitar and drums with a precision that is almost confrontational. The rhythms are complex, the intervals are unsettling, and the overall effect is of music that seems to be running by its own internal logic rather than any shared convention.

Their second album, Vol. II, arrived April 3. It is not an easy listen in the comfortable sense. It is an easy listen in the sense that, once you are inside it, it holds you there with a grip that’s hard to explain. The microtonal bends on guitar create an unease that the drums refuse to resolve. The structures are formal but wrong, like architecture that has been built to code but in a language you don’t speak.

The masks and costumes are not affectation. They are integral to the project in a way that makes more sense live, where Angine de Poitrine performs with a physicality and theatrical commitment that clarifies what the music is trying to do. The visual anonymity is not about hiding. It is about creating a space where the music is the performer, not the people making it. This is a distinction that matters more than it might initially seem.

The Grohl endorsement brought them a level of international attention that their output probably would have reached eventually, just more slowly. The viral moment has done what viral moments do: it sent a lot of people to the music who would not otherwise have found it, and the music was strong enough to justify the attention. That is the ideal outcome for a discovery story, and it happens less often than the internet’s discovery machine would suggest.

What makes Angine de Poitrine genuinely interesting rather than merely interesting-as-curiosity is that the weirdness is in service of something. The microtonal system is not there to be difficult. It creates a specific emotional register, a kind of productive dissonance, that conventional tuning cannot access. The complexity of the rhythms is not showing off. It generates tension that has nowhere to go except forward. The masks mean the performance is always about the performance, never about the performers’ personalities or histories.

They are a band from Quebec making experimental rock that sounds like nothing else currently getting attention, and they are getting attention anyway because it turns out that when music is genuinely good, the audience for it eventually appears. Even if it takes Dave Grohl watching a video at the right moment to set it off.

Start with Vol. II. If it doesn’t immediately make sense, give it two more listens. It will.