Forget the polished shine of modern pop charts; Angine de Poitrine have come back to remind everyone that the most infectious music is often the kind that sounds like it is wobbling on the edge of collapse while snapping into place at the very same moment. The Quebecois duo, Khn and Klek, follow their viral KEXP breakthrough with Vol. II, a record that feels like a cross between a sleepless mathematician’s notebook and a distorted, over-saturated Saturday morning cartoon playing on a broken TV. Arriving on April 3rd, this second album is a relentless collision of sound that swaps clean, digital gloss for the raw, motorik momentum of a band pushing its luck and somehow always landing on its feet.
The album unfolds like a shifting mechanical maze, with corridors that twist under your feet and walls that slide away just when you think you have it mapped out. Lead track “Fabienk” sets the tone immediately, hitting like a jazz-adjacent version of early Talking Heads tumbling down a staircase made of odd time signatures and jagged chord stabs. Every beat feels slightly off-centre yet perfectly intentional. “Mata Zyklek” follows with a kind of “djent-metal” precision that has been stripped of distortion and aggression, leaving only the intricate skeleton of the rhythm. What remains is a dry, skeletal funk that lives off an obsessive, almost military sense of timing, the sort of rhythmic discipline that keeps your ear locked in even when the melodies seem to dissolve around it.
Throughout the record, the duo’s invented stage language and homemade papier-mâché visuals give everything a surreal, playful frame. Their masks, costumes, and cryptic hand gestures turn each performance into a half-ceremonial, half-cartoon ritual, softening the impact of the music’s technical density. That visual absurdity works like a pressure valve, allowing Vol. II to stay light on its feet and genuinely funny even as the arrangements flirt with total overload. The songs feel like puzzles, but they never lose their sense of mischief.
This balance between rigour and chaos is most striking on “Yor Zarad,” where Khn’s knack for writing deceptively simple, timeless guitar hooks cuts through the blur of Klek’s kaleidoscopic drumming. The drums roll, scatter, and reassemble, shifting between tight grooves and frantic fills, while the guitar clings to a melody that feels instantly familiar, as if it had always existed but no one had thought to plug it into a song like this. The album gradually tightens its grip until it reaches “Angor,” a dense, slow-burning build that suggests the scale and drama of an unplugged Dream Theatre performance held in a cramped basement. The tension mounts in tiny increments, layers folding over each other until the whole structure suddenly collapses into a supernova of silence. The effect is shocking and oddly emotional, as if the room itself had been holding its breath. It is a breathtaking composition that manages to be both microtonal and genuinely joyful, perched somewhere between a high-art inside joke and a sincere, wide-eyed musical breakthrough.
Whether Vol. II is a calculated middle finger to the high-art establishment or simply the most committed “alien funk” project of the decade; it refuses to be background noise. Every track demands total focus, rewarding the listener with unexpected humour, subtle earworms, and genuine catharsis. With their debut UK tour this May already sold out, the buzz surrounding Angine de Poitrine has officially moved past internet oddity status into something closer to a vital cultural event. You don’t need to untangle every reference or speak their invented language to feel the impact; Vol. II stands as one of the most essential and delightfully strange releases of 2026.
