Angine de Poitrine : A Phenomenon from Another World
Very serious thoughts on art, AI, and two Quebecois extraterrestrials.
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May 20, 2026
Early 2026, I started a new job. It’s serious, it’s corporate, it pays well, I got a company laptop and phone, I wear button-downs, I drink coffee during meetings, and I head home with a migraine.
In the middle of all this, I accidentally stumble upon a TikTok breaking down the technical and theoretical intricacies and the completely unhinged universe of a Quebecois music group called Angine de Poitrine. Now, this is a massive change from my daily bullshit-job routine: polka-dot suits, microtonal double-neck guitars, an alien language, masks and symbols everywhere. I was no stranger to this style of music, King Gizzard, METZ, Viagra Boys, Chat Pile, Horse Lords… Yet, a strange fascination drew me right to this specific band.
A point of honor I want to emphasize: I couldn’t care less about who is hiding behind those crazy costumes. Anonymity and privacy are way too sacred nowadays to be messed with. So, I won’t be speculating on any other potential bands that Khn and Klek might belong to.
Khn de Poitrine live - personal photograph.
Klek de Poitrine live - personal photograph.
I’ve always been artistic without actually being artistic (srr, no transition). I don’t know how to play an instrument, and it’s not for lack of trying (4 years of piano, 4 years of music theory, 2 years of guitar…) but my brain just isn't wired for it. I’ve tried everything: painting, sculpting, drawing, pottery, mosaic… but something always catches up with me: I’m just not gifted, at least not in the way people expect me to be, and on top of that, I have zero patience. Any form of logic required of me tends to completely escape me.
But without even trying, I have this deep admiration for art and what it does to the inside of my physical being. I don't see art as technique, but rather as (and I really don’t know how to explain this, so buckle up for a completely incomprehensible description) a sort of color that takes over my being and my physical body. To me, art that triggers this sensation feels like an introspective, sensational orgasm. I couldn’t describe it any other way, except with the phrase I tend to overuse all the time:
Good music is like an orgasm imposed by divine grace.
So, to sum it up, I can’t do much with my hands, but art consumes me as if it were the sole purpose of my existence. I look for this feeling everywhere, constantly, even in people (calm down, I’m still talking about art, nothing sexual here…). I’m the kind of person who cries at a museum, stays in a daze for 20 minutes after a song, and gets goosebumps after watching a movie… It’s only when I realized that my brain hated logic and didn’t want to, or rather couldn’t, understand it, that I accepted my absolute uselessness at creating art the way I was "supposed" to.
So I found myself in a dead end. My entire life is driven by art, but I’m incapable of sitting through a class where they demand a century-old technique and neatly applied, applicable rules. And like everyone else, I need money. I come from a background that gives me all the tools to succeed, so I have to get my degree. For 6 years, I just went with the flow without really knowing what I want to do: intensive foundation degree, psychology, ethnology, social sciences, geomatics, urban planning, and finally, I land (almost in spite of myself) as a consultant. I am now what my friends would call "corporate," a "girl boss," and an "office diva," because I present pre-made slide decks, I analyze cases using a pre-made template, I give my pre-made opinion, I organize meetings that are also pre-made, and I speak in Franglais (in my defense, if I don’t, my colleagues don’t understand me, I hate it). And all of a sudden, it’s no longer art that consumes me, but a 9-to-5.
It’s this current situation that triggered this admiration, and almost this need, for Angine de Poitrine. By need, I mean a necessity for art, within a context that completely disrupts the very definition of the concept and its utility.
To be completely honest, I knew about the band before 2026. I have the incredible luck of having a brother who is completely addicted to music, whose literal passion is to unearth the most improbable bands that all end up blowing up a few months or years later (Geese, King Gizzard, MotherHood, Alex G, Duster, Pinegrove…). In short, I think he’s brilliant (self-taught bassist, guitarist, pianist…), passionate, and fascinating. So, he was the one who, in late 2024 / early 2025, mentioned the bizarre trip of two childhood best friends from Quebec and their equally bizarre name, Angine de Poitrine. At the time, it didn’t instantly catch my attention; being a bit slow on the uptake, I was just getting into Cameron Winter. Maybe it was also because my life was different back then, I wasn't working yet, I was skipping half my classes to go to the movies, visit exhibitions, drink coffee in the sun, and write.
So I stumbled back upon this band by chance, and step by step, I turned them into an escape hatch as much as a source of non-stop questioning. Their music and their universe fascinate me, this completely cracked-out artistic project blows my mind. But I had no one around me to talk to about it. Quietly, I started running a sort of propaganda campaign, but it wasn’t catching on (I would’ve made a terrible dictator, fortunately?)... Then one day, out of nowhere, a colleague brought up their polka-dot universe during a break. None of my friends had ever heard of them, but a 58-year-old technician just randomly asked me: "I don't know if you listen to this king of music, but have you heard of the band Angine de Poitrine?"
Hallelujah. This man instantly became my best friend, my confidant, and my unwitting victim. He loved the visual mystery and the musical digression. So, we talked about it over several coffee breaks. That’s how I learned that on December 6, 2025, Khn and Klek de Poitrine had played at the Transmusicales festival in Rennes, and that their Live on KEXP video recorded during the festival dropped on February 5, 2026, and racked up over 14 million views.
However, the band’s global explosion isn't just due to a lucky chain of events, it's also tied to the specific landscape of art today. It’s the ultimate debate of the moment: art and AI.
For nearly two years now, we’ve been witnessing the mainstreaming of generative AI, and it’s showing up across all ages, social classes, and fields. Today, you can generate a PowerPoint presentation for clients, videos of talking fruit, family photos in places you’ve never visited, and now, even art. This last realization completely upends every discussion about what art truly is, and what it should be.
But is there even a stable definition of what art is?
Here are two definitions I managed to find (translated from french) :
A set of processes, knowledge, and rules relating to the practice of any given activity or action.
Art is the collective body of creative human activities aimed at expressing an aesthetic ideal, emotions, or ideas, without an immediate practical function.
One of them comes from the Larousse dictionary, and the other is an automated response from Microsoft's Bing Copilot AI (which I can't figure out how to deactivate, help). Much to my surprise, the one that feels the most human to me actually came from an AI: "creative human activities." So there I was, sitting in front of my screen after Googling "definition of art," feeling like I was being punked.
Anyway, after the initial shock wore off, I remembered my philosophy classes, my hazy memories of my intensive foundation degree, and ethnography lectures: art is constantly evolving, our vision is heavily ethnocentric, and what might be true right now or somewhere, might be false tomorrow or over there. But this overly simplistic conclusion about art bothers me, and this is where I’m going to add my two cents (as if I don’t give my opinion enough already).
To me, the very essence of art is human, and generative AI goes completely against this foundation.
AI doesn't imagine or create anything; it steals, plunders, and usurps like a colonizer. Bit by bit, it is colonizing art, our imagination, artists, and our lives. It dehumanizes the entire artistic process, even when the goal of the creation is pure absurdity.
Angine de Poitrine appears like a breath of fresh air, and I cling to this absurd, dadaist universe because I see a form of artistic, deeply human (or extraterrestrial) hope in it. Not a distraction from our reality, but rather a brutal and necessary wake-up call, reminding us that it isn't vital to understand everything, to rationalize everything, or to make everything useful just to fully feel something. Their universe awakens that irrational sensation of existing, which we've almost forgotten. I think we all needed that.
Recently, I had the chance to see them live, and standing in the middle of the crowd, it was impossible to tell who this artistic performance was actually meant for. It resonated just as much with my 58-year-old colleague as it did with young high schoolers, students lost in the face of the corporate world, or someone hesitating to quit their job and completely pivot. Because deep down, I think this form of expression, swimming almost entirely against the current of AI, answers a need that I profoundly hope we all share.
Angine de Poitrine live - personal photograph.

















