Two anonymous musicians from Quebec, a pair of enormous papier-mâché noses and a homemade microtonal guitar. Somehow, it has become one of rock’s biggest stories.
Somewhere in the crush of a sold-out crowd at London’s Electric Ballroom, several hundred people are forming a triangle with their hands and holding it above their heads. On stage, two musicians in black and white polka-dot bodysuits and oversized papier-mâché masks do the same thing back at them, in total silence. Neither has spoken a word all evening. Neither, as far as the audience knows, ever has.
This is Angine de Poitrine, a two-piece from the Chicoutimi district of Saguenay in Quebec who, in little more than a year, have gone from playing to a few dozen people at home to selling out venues across Canada, the United States and Europe. They have never given an on-camera interview in their own voices. Nobody outside their inner circle is meant to know their real names. And their music, built around unusual instruments and microtonal intervals, has won admirers ranging from Dave Grohl to Metallica’s Lars Ulrich.
It is an unlikely route to becoming one of the most talked-about live acts around. But judging by the crowds now following them from Leeds to Los Angeles, it is working.
A joke that got out of hand
The two men behind the masks perform as Khn de Poitrine, who plays guitar and bass, and Klek de Poitrine, on drums. They are presented as brothers, although the band has acknowledged that particular detail is part of the fiction. What does appear consistent across their in-character interviews is that the pair have played music together since they were thirteen, through a succession of earlier, unmasked bands.
The costumes apparently began as a private joke rather than some carefully planned artistic statement. Booked to play the same small venue in Saguenay twice within a week in 2019, they worried nobody would bother turning up again. Their solution was wonderfully ridiculous: disguise themselves completely, adopt a new name and hope friends and regulars would not realise they were watching the same musicians. Khn has compared the spirit of it to an Andy Kaufman stunt. The joke simply carried on.
The pandemic interrupted things, as it did for most working musicians. Both reportedly took construction jobs while venues were closed. When they returned to the project afterwards, it was, in Klek’s phrase, pedal to the metal.
Twenty-four notes instead of twelve
Strip away the noses and polka dots and there is some seriously unusual musicianship underneath. Angine de Poitrine’s compositions have no lyrics and, for the most part, no conventional verses or choruses. They sit loosely under the math-rock umbrella, with shifting rhythms and patterns, but the band’s sound reaches further than that. Comparisons have ranged from Meshuggah’s interlocking grooves and Dawn of Midi’s trance-like repetition to the freewheeling psychedelia of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, whose 2017 album Flying Microtonal Banana is among the influences the band has cited.
At the centre of it is Khn’s double-necked guitar and bass, built to his specification in 2023 by Saguenay luthier Raphael Le Breton. Both necks have extra frets beyond the standard twelve notes to the octave, opening up microtonal intervals more commonly heard in Turkish, Japanese and Middle Eastern music than in rock. The build reportedly took more than three months and over 150 hours, and even includes oversized glow-in-the-dark fret markers – useful when the man playing it can barely see through his mask.
Khn plays barefoot, with hands and feet painted white and dotted black to match the costume, and uses his feet as well as his hands during performances. A loop pedal lets him build layers in real time. Live, the music seems to assemble and reassemble itself in front of you. It is less a conventional song than a groove you gradually find yourself falling into.
The clip that would not stop spreading
For a long time, this remained a story largely confined to Quebec’s independent music scene. Then came KEXP. The American station filmed Angine de Poitrine in Rennes in December 2025, around their appearance at the Trans Musicales festival, and posted the session online in February 2026. It took off spectacularly. By late March, KEXP itself was reporting more than 7.5 million YouTube views across clips from the session, alongside another six million on Instagram. The numbers have continued to climb.
Then came the famous faces. Dave Grohl said the performance had blown his mind. Lars Ulrich reportedly appeared unannounced at a small show in Amiens the night before Metallica played nearby. Stromae was spotted at a Brussels concert, while Canadian producer deadmau5 created and played a remix of one of their tracks. For an instrumental band with no public faces and no conventional songs, that is quite a spread of admirers.
A trophy, then a very quiet acceptance speech
Industry recognition was already beginning before the KEXP explosion. In November 2025, Angine de Poitrine won Artist of the Year at Quebec’s GAMIQ awards. The following June, with their profile transformed, they appeared at the Billboard Canada Power Players event in Toronto to accept a Global Breakthrough Award. Naturally, they arrived in full costume, said nothing and left behind a burst of black and white confetti.
Their second album, Vol. II, arrived independently in April 2026 and helped settle the question of whether there was anything beneath the novelty. Pitchfork praised the way the duo had found real groove in music that might otherwise seem wilfully awkward, while Clash argued that the record showed they were much more than a visual gimmick. The band has not been on the wider radar long enough for any grand historical verdict, but the serious reviews are now arriving alongside the viral attention.
Bigger rooms, bigger crowds
The touring story may be the clearest measure of what has happened. UK dates have repeatedly outgrown the rooms originally booked for them. Their May London show moved to the Electric Ballroom, and the autumn run grew again, with Glasgow, Dublin and Leeds shifted into larger venues and a second night added at London’s Troxy. Both Troxy dates are now sold out. Angine de Poitrine have been nominated for two BAFTA Cymru Awards, but as yet, to our knowledge, haven’t played in Cardiff.
A free outdoor appearance at the Montreal International Jazz Festival at the end of June drew an enormous crowd, with organisers comparing the scenes to some of the festival’s biggest previous gatherings. Exact attendance at an open-air event is inevitably difficult to pin down, but there was no mistaking the scale of it. This was no longer a cult curiosity playing to a roomful of people who had discovered a strange video online.
Who are they, really?
Eventually, every conversation about Angine de Poitrine arrives at the obvious question: who is underneath the masks? The answer remains that nobody outside the band’s circle appears to know for certain. Quebec’s media has largely resisted the temptation to spoil the game, although online sleuths have inevitably tried.
Away from cameras, the pair reportedly use their ordinary speaking voices. Put a camera in front of them and the characters return. During their appearance on Quebec talk show Tout le monde en parle, they communicated in alien squeaks and grunts while their manager translated the invented language. The commitment is so complete that the anonymity has become part music, part comedy and part performance art.
Not everyone is convinced
Inevitably, not everybody has joined the fan club. Euronews questioned whether the hype was deserved and concluded that, while Angine de Poitrine are not reinventing microtonal music, they apply it with considerable charm. Devin Townsend was more sceptical, wondering whether the same music would attract so much attention without the enormous noses, although he also admitted he had not properly listened to it. An opinion piece for God Is In The TV went further, asking whether the excitement might disappear as quickly as it arrived.
Khn does not entirely reject the point. He has acknowledged that it would be presumptuous to pretend the success is all about the music, joking that the band is good clickbait. His argument is essentially simple: if the noses make people click and the music makes them stay, everybody wins.
What comes next…
For something that began as a way of avoiding recognition at a small venue in Saguenay, Angine de Poitrine has travelled an extraordinary distance. Vol. II is now on the ten-album shortlist for the 2026 Polaris Music Prize, with the winner due to be announced in Toronto on 22 September, while their autumn UK and European dates continue to sell out.
Whether this survives a third album, whether the masks eventually come off or whether the whole strange enterprise simply mutates again is anybody’s guess. For now, though, two old friends who once pulled on papier-mâché noses so their neighbours would not recognise them have somehow become one of rock’s most compelling stories. And perhaps the strangest part is that, once the novelty wears off, the music is still interesting enough to keep you there.
We haven’t been this intrigued by a band in a very long time. And yes, we bought the album.
For us, Zappa is perhaps the closest comparison – not because Angine de Poitrine particularly sound like him, but because they share that wonderful disregard for what music is supposed to do. There’s humour, absurdity and formidable musicianship, but also a sense that somebody has taken the rulebook, read it carefully and then cheerfully thrown it out of the window.
Nothing is completely original, of course, and the band themselves happily acknowledge their influences. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard opened the door to microtonality, while 1970s progressive rock, jazz, Eastern music and Gentle Giant are all somewhere in the mix. And then there’s Frank Zappa.
Music Life verdict…
We love them. There, we’ve said it. Angine de Poitrine are quirky, funny, extraordinarily accomplished and, most importantly, different. In an age when so much music can feel familiar before you’ve even reached the second chorus, it’s rare to hear something that genuinely makes you wonder what on earth is going on.
Editorial note
The band deliberately protects the identity of its members. Details about their early history are therefore based on accounts given by Angine de Poitrine in character and should be treated accordingly. Attendance estimates for free outdoor shows also vary between reports.
Photo references
Images for this feature were sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Individual image pages should be retained as the definitive reference for photographer attribution and licence terms.
* Angine de Poitrine performing at La Cartonnerie, Reims, 17 February 2026. Photographer: ReimsCroixRouge. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
* Khn de Poitrine at Le Zaricot, Saint-Hyacinthe, 17 April 2026. Photographer: FriseIntense. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
* Klek de Poitrine at Le Zaricot, Saint-Hyacinthe, 17 April 2026. Photographer: FriseIntense. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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