Angine De Poitrine

If Vol. 1 was the secret handshake, Vol. II is the full initiation rite. The anonymous Quebec duo's sophomore album landed in April 2026 with the weight of near-impossible expectations - sold-out tours across two continents, a viral KEXP session with millions of views, Pitchfork and Fantano circling the wagons - and the remarkable thing is that Angine De Poitrine didn't flinch. Six new tracks, same formula on paper - Khn's microtonal double-neck and loop pedals, Klek's ferocious yet calculated drumming - but with a wider palette, deeper grooves, and a confidence that turns every track into a slow-building detonation.

Where the debut operated in tightly coiled spirals, Vol. II breathes and expands. Opener Fabienk - already a live favourite from the KEXP set - pulls you in with its staccato riffing before unfurling into a layered microtonal maze that somehow makes you want to dance and scratch your head at the same time. Utzp shifts gears mid-track like a sped-up circus collapsing into a rocked-out Deep Purple jam filtered through quarter-tone tuning. The precision is drum-machine tight but the swing is unmistakably human, and the interplay between the two players borders on telepathic.

The critics aren't wrong this time: this is where Angine De Poitrine move from curiosity to something undeniable. Beneath the papier-mâché masks, the alien grunts and the pyramid hand signs, there's a duo playing with a kind of joyful ferocity that makes most contemporary rock feel politely irrelevant. The fact that microtonal guitar tunings and asymmetric time signatures are now a topic of mainstream conversation is entirely their doing - and Vol. II is the record that justifies every bit of it.