Meet 2026’s Weirdest (and Best!) New Band: Angine de Poitrine
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
What I’m about to write about below, and try to explain to you, is going to sound like the fever dreams of a mad man who wandered the Pop Art Desert of the Mind for 40 years and came here to tell you about what he saw, so, it’s probably better for all of us if you start with the video below:
What you’re looking at and hearing is Angine de Poitrine, a new band from Quebec that is named after the French phrase for “chest pains from a heart attack,” which is about as good of a description of watching them play that exists. They perform in all polka-dots that also continue to their bare skin, and with head pieces that have large proboscis noses and golden triangles and fu-manchus made from rope. They flash a triangle hand signal that is not that dissimilar from Jay-Z’s HOV, and they never break kayfabe, staying in their bizarre, Cirque de Soleil getups at all times. Formed by two anonymous musicians who say they’ve been playing together for more than 20 years, they say they came up with this band when they were booked to play the same venue twice the same week and needed to come up with a second band to be a part of. The video above has gone viral, getting the kind of eyeballs that only greet Tiny Desk Concerts. Their second album, Vol 2. came out last Friday, and it’s one of this year’s best albums.
None of what you read about above would have been mentioned here if that last sentence wasn’t true. Vol. 2 is a dynamite stick of riffs and drum beats. Angine’s music is 99% instrumental, and the sounds the duo wrings out of a drum kit, a looping pedal, and a hilariously and prodigiously fretted bass-guitar combo is impossibly large. If there are vocals, they are in an unintelligible language at an unnatural pitch, so describing what their music sounds like becomes a fun game to play, as evidenced by the comments on the video above. So, here goes: They make music that the Doof Warrior made before he sold out and became Immortan Joe’s war-guitarist. They sound like Frank Zappa if he was a member of the Ramones. They sound like the music that plays in Rob Gronkowski’s head as he runs downfield. They sound like a copy of Guitar Hero became sentient. They sound like a nervous breakdown in a Formula 1 car on Mercury. They sound like the soundtrack to an unwritten Werner Herzog movie about the blitzkrieg. They sound like a mechanical bull broke contain. They sound like someone turned all of rock history into The Matrix, and these guys are both Neo.
You get the point. It’s rare that a band can come along and set the world alight anymore, or inspire the kind of fun and wonder these two have mustered in the last few weeks. Goes to show that no matter of market research can predict what music will suddenly go viral. Imagine pitching an instrumental polka dot band with prog-rock riffs at a work meeting. You’d get laughed out of the room. Instead, they’re everywhere. Sometimes the world just gets it right.
