Angine de Poitrine: The Masked Quebec Duo Breaking the Internet with Microtonal Madness

If you’ve been online on Instagram or YouTube or you we’re out with friends in the last few weeks, you must have heard of Angine de Poitrine. A lot of people are also talking about them in the guitar world lately. So there’s a good chance someone has already sent you a video of two musicians in oversized papier-mâché masks and black-and-white polka-dot costumes making weird unhinged music. That band is called Angine de Poitrine, and they are currently one of the most talked-about acts on the internet.

Who Are They?

Angine de Poitrine is a Canadian rock duo formed in the Chicoutimi borough of Saguenay, Quebec, in 2019. The band is composed of two anonymous musicians performing under pseudonyms as guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine. Their real identities remain hidden, and they even conduct interviews in a made-up language with a “translator” voicing their answers. The name itself, which translates as “angina of the chest,” was initially a joke that stuck.

The project began as a gag after the pair were booked to perform twice in one week at the same local Saguenay venue. Concerned that audiences would not attend the second show, they decided to play the latter set as anonymous, costumed performers under a different name.

What started as a disguise became an artistic identity.

And suddenly, they blew up and became very well known

In December 2025, the duo won “Artist of the Year” at the GAMIQ awards. That same month, they performed at Trans Musicales in Rennes, France, and footage from the set was later released by Seattle radio station KEXP on 5 February 2026. The video became an immediate viral success, accumulating over two million views within its first week of release. By the time you’re reading this, those numbers are far higher.

The reaction from the guitar community and the internet has been insane. Rick Beato says no other act has flooded his inbox quite like Angine de Poitrine, receiving roughly 25 emails a day about them along with thousands of comments. Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl praised the band, saying they “absolutely blew his mind” and describing them as “completely bonkers.”

The weird guitar and bass that they play with.

Here’s where it gets really interesting for us guitar nerds. The strange guitar at the heart of their sound is a completely custom double-neck instrument unlike anything you’ve seen in a guitar shop.

The band’s microtonal approach actually began with a DIY experiment. Drummer Klek de Poitrine took two guitars and moved the frets from one board to another, creating an instrument that played notes that shouldn’t exist. From that improvised starting point, the idea grew into something more ambitious.

The guitar’s double-neck design draws parallels with Jack White’s half-guitar, half-bass “Ugly Stick,” but the fret spacing is in a different league entirely. Khn de Poitrine plays a double-necked hybrid instrument consisting of a Fender-Stratocaster-like guitar and bass, separately wired, and each with additional microtonal frets. It was custom-built by a Saguenay-based luthier which reportedly took over 150 hours of work to complete.

On the guitar half, every fret up to the 15th is essentially doubled, meaning there is an extra fret inserted exactly halfway between each standard fret. The custom double-neck operates in 24-tone equal temperament (24-TET), where the smallest interval is a quarter tone, which is 50 cents or half a semitone. In practical terms, this gives Khn access to notes that simply don’t exist on a standard guitar, or on any piano for that matter.

Klek describes the moment they first played the early 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 Itself

Their musical style has been described as math rock and experimental rock, with additional influences from microtonal music and progressive rock. The group describes itself as a “mantra-rock Dada Pythago-Cubist orchestra,” reflecting their fusion of technical complexity, hypnotic repetition, and absurdist aesthetics. Cited influences include King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Frank Zappa, John Scofield, and Gentle Giant. Their performances are largely instrumental, and the few vocals that appear are distorted and difficult to understand.

Khn explains their philosophy around the microtonal language: “The goal is to use these notes like any others. Not as decoration, but as the language itself.”

Their debut album Vol. 1 was released in June 2024, followed by their second studio album Vol. II on 3 April 2026. The KEXP live session is the natural entry point, and fair warning: you will watch it at least twice.

For guitarists, Angine de Poitrine are a genuine reminder of how much unexplored territory still exists on an instrument we think we know inside out.