Style: Math rock, experimental rock, psychedelic rock (mostly instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Battles, Gentle Giant
Country: Canada
Release date: 3 April 2026

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From its earliest days, The Progressive Subway has championed the overlooked and the underappreciated. The original premise of the blog centred around reviewing “underground” bands. The metric chosen to delineate an artist’s status as underground was first defined by the blog’s founders as having fewer than 5,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, a figure that was later increased to 20,000, before the cap was eventually removed altogether shortly before I joined the team in January of 2025. This measured and highly intentional shift reflected a desire to explore the world of progressive rock and metal from the genres’ hidden nooks and crannies to their towering titans and maybe, sometimes, a band who’s been both.

At the time of writing, the subject of today’s review exceeds our old limit by nearly a hundred times, sitting at a cool 1.8 million monthly listeners. Experimental rock duo Angine de Poitrine hails from Saguenay, Quebec—a few hundred kilometres from where I live. After schlepping through a few years in relative obscurity, their meteoric rise in popularity has attracted much attention in the online music communities that I frequent, but also in my real-life local spheres. So much so, in fact, that a former colleague of mine from my decidedly non-musical day job¹ emailed me recently to ask if Angine de Poitrine was on my radar. Yet beyond the currents of regional pride and mounting curiosity lies a more pressing question: having crossed the divide from the underground to the overground, does Angine de Poitrine truly merit their sudden acclaim?

The duo’s ascent is primarily owed to a viral live performance on KEXP. Evidently, there’s something inherently captivating about masked musicians (just ask Vince or any of Sleep Token’s five and a half million monthly listeners). But in this case, it’s not just the masks, but the entire aesthetic: surreal, uncanny, and somewhat insectile, culminating in guitarist Khn de Poitrine’s proboscis-like visage. It’s the sort of thing I could see myself showing a friend on YouTube deep in the back of a grungy computer lab in 2011.

So, how’s the music? Instrumentally, it’s a streamlined package. As talented as they may be, Angine de Poitrine’s two members can only do so much at once, and “so much” consists of a double-necked bass-guitar combo wielded by the aforementioned Khn de Poitrine. With the aid of a heavily-used loop pedal, he layers interlocking lines which twirl tight math rock formulas around a microtonal scale as percussionist Klek de Poitrine punctuates with odd-metred rhythms that remain eminently toe-tappable even across shifting time signatures. If none of those ten million KEXP YouTube views were you, it may help to imagine King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard or Gentle Giant having a cousin who’s on a lot of drugs. When I reviewed another microtonal album earlier this year, I mentioned how some artists employ the cracks between the Western scale’s twelve tones to unsettle or estrange the listener, and Angine de Poitrine’s tonal formulations are certainly rather alien. More so than any other album I’ve reviewed for the Subway, Vol. II is simultaneously fascinatingly cool and also makes me wonder whether I might be on the verge of a brain aneurysm.

Angine de Poitrine clearly cares more about the journey than the destination; frankly, at the close of Vol.II’s thirty-seven minutes, I still have no idea what the destination might be. Opening track “Fabienk” provides a fitting introduction to this trippy meandering. The eddying guitar groove at its core is compelling and makes you want to bob your head in spite of its uneven metre. But before we get to it, there’s a minute and a half of fiddly, buzzy bits and bobs that sound not unlike the mosquito evoked by Khn’s mask. And just as you begin to sink your teeth into the groove, it’s whisked away.

It may be funny to say about an album containing so many notes, but Vol.II does skew rather one-note as it spins along. The prevailingly buzzy guitar tone persists throughout, and the frenetic energy rarely relents. Like a duck ceaselessly churning its feet underwater, Angine de Poitrine spends most of the album sculling along at a jittery tempo. The few moments that break from this momentum can’t help but stand out by contrast, and leave the listener wanting more. The skunky, grungy bassline that opens “Sarniezz” enjoys only a brief spell of prominence before being engulfed by the guitar. Elsewhere, and similarly bass-forward, “Utzp” lollops along like a circus animal with three legs. The track bounces with unlikely charm but overstays its welcome after a false stop four minutes in, followed by another three minutes of essentially the same idea, albeit with increased emetic noodling from the guitar. Although they’re not mentioned in Vol.II’s Bandcamp credits, the album does feature sparse vocal interjections, most extensively on “Mata Zyklek”. These function as part of the instrumental fracas, heavily distorted and devoid of discernible lyrics. The same principle appears to inform the track titles themselves, which stack up like tilting Jenga towers of angular, nonsensical consonants.

Taking in Vol.II at large—its music, its ethos, its aesthetic—it’s easy to imagine that Angine de Poitrine are coming down from a particularly intense trip and trying with dogged, thorough insistence to explain to you how eating the same thing for breakfast every day really means that you are just consuming one continuous meal for your entire life, while you nod politely, bemused, and wait for them to shut up. Ultimately, they’re no closer to a good explanation on closer “Angor” than they were at the beginning, as the album pulses to its end in a final mirage-like heat cloud of anxious microtones. Full-throated in its eccentricity, Vol. II displays talent, technical prowess, and unshakeable weirdness in no small measure. Whether Angine de Poitrine can go on to better refine and variegate their musical vision or crash-land in the ruins of their own stardom remains to be seen, but Vol.II’s buzzing, bewildering spectacle is sure to leave a mark.

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Recommended tracks: Utzp, Sarniezz
You may also like: The Mercury Tree, Melt Yourself Down, Adebisi Shank
Final verdict: 5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Independent

Angine de Poitrine is:
– KHN de Poitrine (guitar, bass)
– Klek de Poitrine (drums, percussion)

1.  It may shock you to learn that reviewing bands that hardly anyone listens to does not bring home the bacon. Also, if you’re reading this, hi Andrew! ↩︎