incomprehensible

Two figures with masks with very long noses and white suits with black polka dots (or black ones with white polka dots). A double-neck guitar with more frets than usual. A looper operated with bare feet, also painted with polka dots. And 27 minutes of music that divide the scale into 24 tones instead of the 12 of the Western system. This is how Angine de Poitrine entered the lives of millions of people who had never heard of math rock in their lives. How we met Angine De Poitrine. The video that changed everything was recorded by the Seattle public station KEXP during the Transmusicales festival in Rennes, in December 2025. They published it on YouTube in February 2026. In a matter of weeks it has accumulated millions of views, it has almost 8. In the comments, someone wrote: “The AI: Humans no longer have anything to do in music. Angine de Poitrine: Hold the triangular Martian beer for me.” Quite a diagnosis of the crux of the matter. Twenty years playing the Martian. Khn and Klek de Poitrine (pseudonyms, obviously) have been making music together for more than two decades, since they were teenagers. They launched Angine de Poitrine just before the pandemic, in 2019, although they didn’t start performing regularly until 2023. The name, which in French means “angina pectoris”, is a devotion to the absurd, like everything in this project: the costumes came about as a joke because they wanted to play twice in the same week in the same venue, but the venue wouldn’t allow it, so they dressed up to be booked as if they were another group. And they kept the costumes. But what is this? The music that Angine de Poitrine plays is objectively difficult to describe. Themselves They have defined it as “dada-Pythagus-cubist rock-mantra”which does not clarify much but does point to the unclassifiable spirit of the project. Khn plays a double-neck bass guitar custom builtwhich allows you to play microtones, the intervals between conventional notes. Activate the looper with bare feet while Klek maintains a usually frenetic rhythm on the drums, brimming with changes of rhythm and time signature. What is microtonality. The melodies are based on a system of 24 tones per octave instead of the 12 usual in Western music. Some of his compositions move in time signatures as infrequent as 10/4, 17/4 or 28/4. For a listener accustomed to the Western tradition, the result sounds slightly “out of place”, in a constant tension that is difficult to express. Danick Trottier, musicologist at UQAM, has explained that the duo works primarily with quarter tones, half a standard semitone, creating a dramatically dissonant effect. Influences? There are a few: Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, Primus, King Crimson, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, and more exotically, Indonesian gamelan and Middle Eastern music. It is not exactly the list of references of a group that thinks about the mass market. And that is the key to why they have attracted so much attention. Nobody knows who they are. The anonymity of its members goes beyond a mere nod to the Internet, but is taken very seriously. Their manager, Sébastien Collin, has undertaken a task of meticulously removing any mention of the band’s two members’ real names on the internet, and the group’s website warns that Angine de Poitrine is “an anonymous artistic project” and that any speculation about the identity of its members may constitute an invasion of their privacy. It goes viral. When KEXP (with a long history of presenting groups that end up becoming references) published the video, the reactions came in cascade: guitarists, jazz fans, progressive rock fans and people who had not paid attention to current music for years decided to spread it. Rick Beatoone of the most watched music analysis YouTubers in the world, claimed to receive 25 emails a day asking about the duo, more than about any other artist in the history of his channel. Dave Grohl He stated that the duo “literally blew his mind” and that he didn’t know how to explain it except to say that they had to be seen. The snowball was unstoppable. What makes the phenomenon unique is that the virality It wasn’t just from top to bottom.: Many of those respected voices started talking about the duo because their own listeners kept sending them the linkmaking fans the real engine of spread, not passive recipients. Ahead of the popes music intellectuals. Immediate success. Success has immediate and quite striking economic translation. Tickets for his concerts in Toronto already have resale prices of over $500. The vinyls of their first album, ‘Vol. YO’, They have sold for $2,000.. Their concert dates in New York, Los Angeles, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium sold out in minutes. This past April 3, 2026 they published ‘Vol. II’, their second album, which includes three of the songs from the already iconic KEXP video and three new compositions. Complex but accessible. There is something paradoxical about Angine de Poitrine: inaccessible music usually slows down uninitiated listeners. Here the opposite happens: difficulty generates analysis and curiosity, and this attracts more listeners, who return to the original video, wondering: “Why do I react like this to this strange thing?” James Gutierrez, assistant professor of music at Northeastern University, point because the thirst for something “obviously insimilable” is the axis of the reaction: this band is the emblem of something that no AI can convincingly replicateand in these times of predictable successes, where it is valued that everything is categorizable, the inimitable is an unexpected value. Another distinguished opinion: Pierre Michaud, associate professor of composition at the Université de Montréal, attributes the success to a “stroke of genius” that combines extreme complexity with a casual presentation. The geopolitical context also appears in the analyses. Gutierrez points out that in a 2026 marked by political gravity, something admirable, creative and playful activates the right mechanisms in the public. We can breathe easy: we continue … Read more