If you don't know Angine de Poitrine yet, you will soon hear about them

On 4 December 2025, on the sidelines of the Trans Musicales in Rennes - the festival that two days later would host their first concert in Europe - Khn and Klek de Poitrine record a four-song session at ESMA for KEXP, the Seattle independent radio station. They get up in front of the camera in black-and-white polka-dotted jumpsuits, paper mache masks with disproportionate noses, and play without saying a word to the camera. When the video appears on YouTube two months later, it becomes one of the most commented on international music forums: the Anglo-Saxon press starts looking for who is hiding behind those masks. It doesn't find him. Khn and Klek do not answer in any recognisable language - they use an invented idiom, with a translator overlay - and their story begins twenty years earlier, in a place that has had an open account with music for decades. Saguenay, in French-speaking Quebec, is the town that in the 1980s produced Voivod, one of the continent's most original metal bands. Khn and Klek have known each other since they were thirteen, two decades of music together from rock to hip-hop and back, before becoming White Stripes from another planet.

Masks was not an artistic project. In 2019, a friend who ran a club in Saguenay needed to fill a gig, but the two had already played there under their own name. The solution? Show up in costumes and masks. They never took them off again. "Vol. I", released in 2024, was a self-produced record of six tracks and thirty-two minutes in length that mixed krautrock sparks over jazz experimentation, flashes of prog reflected over Anatolian echoes. After the Rennes video, it became the most searched album on Discogs for weeks and guaranteed Angine de Poitrine a first UK spring tour, with some dates already sold out, and participation in important summer festivals. "Vol. II" was recorded at Gramofaune Studios and at the Centre d'Expérimentation Musicale in Saguenay, produced by Fabien Peterson with the support of the Conseil des Arts du Canada, because talent has to be nurtured and nurtured.

Khn and Klek's roots lie in Turkish, Japanese, Arabic, Indonesian and Indian musical traditions - built on scales that do not coincide with Western ones - and in the turn that King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard had given to rock with 'Flying Microtonal Banana' in 2017. Khn plays a double-neck guitar custom-built for microtonal music; Klek responds with rhythm-disarticulating drums. "Vol. II" picks up the formula of the debut, with six tracks, almost all well over five minutes, riding on compressed, high-voltage structures. "Mata Zyklek" is a syncopated groove that accelerates to rhythmic saturation, "Fabienk" is more oblique, orbiting around a loop that replicates, doubles and transforms over and over again. The two have come up with perhaps the best description of what they do, calling themselves 'Mantra-Rock Dada Pythagorean-Cubist Orchestra'. Their second album has all this and even bolder structures than their debut. Angine de Poitrine are gearing up for an intense few months, driven by a growing and constant attention span that might even make them one of those mainstream short-circuits to remember.