I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me one week ago that my new favorite band would be an instrumental, microtonal math-rock group clad in papier-mâché masks and polka-dots. And yet, Québécois duo Angine de Poitrine has captivated me and thousands of other music listeners since the release of their sophomore album, Vol.II, April 3.

The band comprises Khn de Poitrine, who plays the guitar and bass, and Klek de Poitrine, who plays the drums. They describe themselves as 333-year-old “spacetime-voyagers” who play “dadaist pythagorean-cubist rock” and speak an alien language. Their manager, Sébastien Collin, serves as a translator in interviews.

Khn wields a double-neck guitar/bass hybrid. Both necks are equipped with frets placed in between western music’s standard 12 per octave, allowing Khn to play twice as many notes. They use their feet to control pedals that record and loop unique parts, creating louder and more complex arrangements than would otherwise be possible for a two-man group. Klek’s drumming grounds Khn’s guitar in ever-shifting time signatures, which only makes the looping that much more impressive.

The two have been able to take these elements, typically reserved for the very fringes of rock, and push them into mainstream consciousness. The video of their performance on Seattle radio station KEXP — where I and many others first heard them — has drawn 8.8 million views on YouTube, and they currently sit at 1.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Part of that appeal comes from the fact that Angine de Poitrine stands defiantly in the face of a music industry facing an onslaught of AI-generated slop. Their weirdness and unpredictability — not only in their alien costumes, but in their sound — are so fundamentally human that no current AI could possibly replicate their music.

Intentionally or not, Khn and Klek de Poitrine have become flag-bearers in the crusade against AI art — polka-dots and all.

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