If you’ve been on Instagram or YouTube lately, or out with musician friends, you’ve almost certainly heard of Angine de Poitrine. There’s a good chance someone has already sent you a clip of two musicians in oversized papier-mâché masks and black-and-white polka-dot costumes, playing music that sounds slightly, wonderfully wrong. They’re one of the most talked-about acts on the internet right now, and the guitar world in particular can’t get enough of them.
Who Are Angine de Poitrine?
Angine de Poitrine is a rock duo from the Chicoutimi borough of Saguenay, Quebec, formed in 2019. The two members perform anonymously as guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine. Their real identities are a secret, and they even give interviews in a made-up language with a “translator” voicing their answers. The name translates as “angina of the chest”, and started as a joke that stuck.
The project itself began as a gag. The pair were booked to play twice in one week at the same venue in Saguenay. Worried nobody would come to the second show, they played it in costume, anonymously, under a different name.
What started as a disguise became an artistic identity.
From Local Joke to Viral Sensation
In December 2025 the duo won Artist of the Year at the GAMIQ awards. That same month they played Trans Musicales in Rennes, France, and footage of the set was later released by Seattle radio station KEXP on 5 February 2026. It went viral straight away, passing two million views in its first week, and the numbers have kept climbing.
The reaction has been huge. Rick Beato said no act has ever flooded his inbox like Angine de Poitrine, with around 25 emails a day about them plus thousands of comments. Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl said they “absolutely blew his mind” and called them “completely bonkers”.
The Microtonal Double-Neck
Here’s where it gets interesting for guitar nerds. At the heart of their sound is a completely custom double-neck instrument unlike anything you’ll find in a shop.
Their microtonal sound started as a DIY experiment. Klek took two guitars and moved the frets from one fretboard to the other, creating an instrument that played notes that shouldn’t exist. From that rough start, the idea grew into something much more ambitious.
Khn now plays a double-neck hybrid: a Stratocaster-style guitar and a bass, wired separately, each with extra microtonal frets. It was built by a luthier in Saguenay and reportedly took more than 150 hours. The concept invites comparisons with Jack White’s half-guitar, half-bass “Ugly Stick”, but the fretting is on another level.
How 24-TET works
On the guitar neck, every fret up to the 15th is doubled, with an extra fret placed exactly halfway between each standard fret. That puts the instrument in 24-tone equal temperament (24-TET), where the smallest step is a quarter tone: 50 cents, or half a semitone. In practice, Khn can play notes that don’t exist on a normal guitar or on a piano.
Klek on the first prototype: “I built the first microtonal guitar we used myself. I added more frets on a guitar with a saw. The moment we started playing it, we just laughed.”
The Music
Their style is usually described as math rock and experimental rock, with influences from microtonal and progressive music. They call themselves a “mantra-rock Dada Pythago-Cubist orchestra”, which sums up the mix of technical complexity, hypnotic repetition and absurd humour. Influences include King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Frank Zappa, John Scofield and Gentle Giant. The music is mostly instrumental, and the few vocals are distorted and hard to make out.
Khn on their approach to microtones: “The goal is to use these notes like any others. Not as decoration, but as the language itself.”
Their debut album Vol. 1 came out in June 2024, followed by Vol. II on 3 April 2026. The KEXP session is the best place to start. Fair warning: you’ll watch it at least twice.
Why It Matters for Guitarists
Angine de Poitrine are a great reminder of how much unexplored ground is left on an instrument we think we know inside out. You don’t need to add frets with a saw to find it, either. Even small changes to your setup, strings or tuning can open up new sounds. Our guides to choosing guitar strings and getting your guitar set up are a good place to start.
Working on a custom build or an unusual mod of your own? GuitarBuddy in Zandvoort does repairs, refrets and upgrades for players in Haarlem, Aerdenhout and Amsterdam.
