Art-rock breakouts Angine de Poitrine surprise Toronto crowd at History with extra alien member - Toronto Star

The masked Quebec duo headlined a boisterous sold-out concert at the east-end venue ahead of playing the RBC Amphitheatre next summer.

Angine de Poitrine brought their alien art rock to History on Nov. 5.

First, the breaking news: Apparently there are three Poitrines now. On Thursday night in Toronto, the extremely sold-out crowd at History gaped as the duo of 333-year-old time-travelling aliens in Angine de Poitrine, Khn (guitarist) and Klek (drummer), made room for a smaller, more feminine-seeming figure to join them on stage.

Sporting a rectangular head with antennae sticking up, and an outfit peppered with standard Poitrine-issue polka dots, the newcomer wielded a triangle — the instrument, not the three-sided hand sign Poitrine fans raise to show their devotion. She (to venture a pronoun) banged away with more enthusiasm than technique whenever she managed to jump into the funk-styled tune the other Poitrines were playing. Then she was gone. Was this fresh figure in the breakout band of 2026 a fleeting vision, or a new chapter in their arcane mythos?

If you’re asking what on earth I’m talking about, let’s back up. In real life, Angine de Poitrine are a couple of guys from the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec, friends and punk-rock musicians since they were young teens. A few years ago, they decided to disguise themselves so they could play two gigs at the same venue in one week without anyone knowing. They crafted papier-mâché heads with long, dong-like noses and dressed in polka-dot outfits and body paint, as if they’d gotten lost on the way to a Dada art cabaret in Paris or Berlin in the 1920s. Thus was born Angine de Poitrine — roughly meaning “chest pain,” like “angina” in English.

They still keep their identities a secret and speak only in guttural jibberish. Khn plays a custom-made, double-necked instrument that works as both guitar and bass and has extra frets so that he can play the microtones between the notes in the standard Western do-re-mi scale. (At one point Thursday, he pretended to get his foot caught between the two necks.) Kle plays a mostly regular drum kit. Using loop pedals, they layer instrumental parts to sound like a larger band, playing what sounds like surf rock pulled under the tide by modal trance musics from far-off continents and lost undersea cities.

Flash-forward to last February, when a video of them playing a festival in France went viral and demand bloomed from every corner. An estimated 70,000 gawkers thronged the streets at the Montreal Jazz Festival. In Toronto this July, the Poitrines were invited to open for Jack White at the 16,000-capacity RBC Amphitheatre, but from there had to shuttle back to their previously booked gig at the 600-person Mod Club the same night.

In September, their album “Vol. II” and song “Fabienk” won prestigious Polaris prizes. This week they packed the 2,500-person History, but by summer they’ll be back headlining instead of opening at the RBC Amphitheatre. Throughout, they’ve remained not only mysteriously anonymous but resolutely independent, turning away all record-label suitors.

The facts alone can’t capture the affection the Poitrines attract, as apparent in the boisterous and very polka-dotted History crowd as it was in all the Halloween costumes the band inspired last weekend. Their mystique, playfulness and handcrafted feel has extra appeal in the age of AI — only real humans can be this eccentric.

After a generous reception at History for Montreal openers Fuudge (not a typo) — whose mixture of progressive rock, metal and punk might seem laughably gauche if it came from anywhere but Quebec — the crowd roared and took constant phone videos as the two Poitrines trundled on to the two risers on the nearly bare stage and had their costumes plugged in by stagehands.

Plugged in? Yes: Perhaps the only visible byproduct of success is that their headpieces now feature lights that can flash along with the music or express their cartoonish emotions. Meanwhile, a highly choreographed array of stage lights helped sustain attention as the band chopped out number after number relying on intricate reiterated guitar riffs, skittering around corners before building to climaxes of brief pandemonium.

I must admit I’m not so compelled by the Poitrines on record. As a longtime listener to the kinds of experimental jazz and noise that influenced them, I find that the looping structures can sound too confined and repetitive. Live, it’s easier to appreciate the absurd humour. Their incomprehensible squawks and barks at the crowd, in this context, seemed almost like a sneaky metaphor for the Québécois predicament as francophone “aliens” stranded in Anglo North America.

In the room, one could also glimpse the vulnerability behind the getups, with Khn’s little white-socked foot poking at his effects pedals. At times the loops could even turn their tricky math-rock time signatures into something approaching danceable.

The most startling thing was to witness thousands of people banging their heads to the kind of oddball music — by guitarists like Fred Frith or Henry Kaiser, for instance — that I’m used to seeing with at best a few dozen fellow obscurists.

Is it a fad whose novelty will wear out, or a phenomenon that could help widen the tastes of a generation? It may depend on whether the Poitrines’ artistic growth can keep up with their crowd sizes.