After weeks of strong exposure on social media and growing international word of mouth, Angine De Poitrine continue their rise with their debut on British television. The masked duo from Quebec were guests of “Later… with Jools Holland”, a historic musical program on English TV considered one of the most prestigious stages for emerging and established artists.
Currently engaged in a European tour – which also stopped in Italy at the Poplar Festival on May 30 – the two Canadian musicians presented live “Fabienk” and “Sarniezz”, songs taken from “Vol. II”, the album released in 2026. The album arrived after the hugely popular session recorded for KEXP, which helped transform Khn and Klek into a viral phenomenon.
For the occasion, the two artists took to the stage with the characteristic polka dot costumes which have long represented one of the central elements of their visual identity. There performanceand “Fabienk”, proposed in a reduced version, was joined by “Sarniezz”, confirming the scenic impact and surreal aesthetics that fueled the success of the online project.
The appearance on “Later… with Jools Holland” represents a further step forward for the duo, arriving after the positive reception given to “Vol. II”. Once the European parenthesis is over, the band will continue its live activity with a long tour between the United States and Canada which will last throughout the summer and autumn. Videos of the television performances are already available online.
Here are the videos of the two below performance.
Klek and Khn de Poitrine, brothers for concept and musicians who have been in the same trench for twenty years, show up in costumes with black and white polka dots and with papier-mâché masks with phallic noses. It seems like a joke performance art came out of Warhol's Factory during an acid session. And in part it is: their very name, Angine de Poitrine, is in fact the medical term for angina pectoris, the chest pain that precedes a heart attack. They are almost a living oxymoron: the music that stops your heart and the one that starts it again at 200 bpm. But the real show is under your fingers. Khn holds a double-neck guitar – half bass, half guitar – modified by hand with extra frets cut with a saw and glued on. The standard Western octave (12 semitones) is here split into 24 quarter tones. It's not a laboratory quirk: it's the very language of the record. The notes that are normally found between the keys (a half-sharp D, a half-flat E) become the protagonists, not the extras. Yet, miraculously, everything remains assimilable. The ear western recognizes each note as distinct, not as an out-of-tune version of a familiar interval. The result is music that seems to come from a nearby planet, but makes you move your feet as if you were still on Earth.
In a rock landscape where innovation is often a marketing label, Angine de Poitrine have built a language new starting from a simply crazy idea: playing the notes that aren't there. They don't do it with the solemnity of the conservatory, but with the humor of the clown and the precision of the surgeon. Costumes are not a gimmick for clickbait but they are a Dada manifesto: depersonalize oneself to let the sound emerge, make the body transparent (even the exposed skin is painted with polka dots like the costumes) so that only the music remains. And the music, in “Vol. II”, is a living organism: sometimes chaotic, sometimes repetitive.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
