Angine de Poitrine’s 333-Year-Old Alien Duo Khn & Klek Sell Out Global Tour

Don’t be surprised if polka dots are never again seen in quite the same way. The bizarre, mystical creatures known as Angine de Poitrine — two self-described 333-year-old space aliens shrouded in spots and mystery — are captivating legions of earthlings with brilliant performances and wholly original music.

The growing tsunami of adoration began in earnest earlier this year with a 30-minute online performance for Seattle public radio station KEXP (below) recorded live last December at the Trans Musicales Festival in Rennes, France. Since its release on YouTube in February, the performance has received more than 19 million views.

At their sold-out shows, crowds participate in rituals such as the raised, triangle-shaped hand gesture Angine de Poitrine use onstage, wearing polka dots and bulbous prosthetic noses, deep bowing and yoga moves while fiercely protecting the duo’s true identities. Double-neck guitarist/bassist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine — two virtuoso musicians who may or may not hail from Saguenay, Quebec — look and sound like no other act.

Visually and conceptually, the instrumental duo fall somewhere between The Residents, Kiss, SNL’s The Coneheads, Mork from Ork and Neolithic paganism. Their distorted alien banter between songs sounds like a language E.T. and Daft Punk might create, while musically, they deliver a complex stew of microtonal and hard math rock with elements of metal, jazz and electronic music, along with self-sampling and incredible lockstep dynamics. Guitarist Khn leaves shredders, gearheads and everyone in between completely agog.

Angine de Poitrine’s growing fanbase includes a number of high-profile musicians: Jack White, who had them open his Toronto RBC Amphitheatre show on July 14, the same evening as the first of their three sold-out shows at the Mod Club; Sean Lennon; Dave Grohl; Shania Twain; and Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. Another early supporter, and fellow masked musician, is Deadmau5, who recently remixed “Fabienk” from the duo’s second album, Vol. II, released in April. It followed their 2024 debut, Vol. 1.

Their current tour booked earlier in the year has transformed into vast underplays, selling out everywhere. The second leg, with multiples at larger rooms, similarly sold out. Their intergalactic sound and jaw-dropping performances have helped drive festival appearances around the world. Their first-ever U.S. tour started in Denver with a pair of sold-out shows at the Ogden (1,600 capacity) on Aug. 12-13 and ends with two shows in Seattle: Dec. 12 at Showbox SoDo (1,800 capacity) and Dec. 13 at the Paramount Theatre (2,807 capacity), with dates in between in Canada, Europe and the U.K.

The band is set to make its U.S. late-night debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday, Sept 14.

As indecipherable 333-year-old space aliens, Khn and Klek don’t do interviews. Pollstar, however, spoke with all four of their booking agents: Roam Artists partners John Bongiorno and Ethan Berlin, who handle the U.S., Mexico and South America; Roam senior agent Duncan Smith, responsible for the EU, Asia and Australia; and The Feldman Agency Vice President Steven Himmelfarb , who takes care of AdP’s adopted homeland of Canada.

Berlin calls their club shows “comically small,” given their popularity.

Bongiorno says that all four agents are “on the same page…our job is to elongate this career, even though they’re in the eye of the storm right now.”

That storm can be seen in real time with drone footage from their record-setting late-June appearance at the Montreal Jazz Festival, while free, it attracted an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people. In July, they played their first US show at Newport Jazz Festival and at month’s end at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival where their set was moved from a late-morning tented slot to early-evening outdoor stage.

Pollstar: As the Canadian in the bunch, Steven, I imagine you were the first person to work with them? Steven Himmelfarb : No, Duncan. It was all within a very short window.

What were your first impressions when you first saw this duo in polka dots and why did each of you want to work with them? Duncan Smith : I saw the guys at M for Montreal festival in November last year. They were the band that were on everyone’s lips throughout the weekend before they played. I saw so many people with their t-shirts on. We got to the venue [Ausgang Plaza on Nov. 21] about an hour early. It was super packed, like one in, one out. We had to flash our delegate badges to make sure that we got in, escorted by Mikey from M himself [Mikey Rishwain Bernard]. The merch queue was completely full, from the moment we got in there throughout the set to when they finished.

The band were actually slightly late getting on stage, and I could really feel the anticipation building in the room. I don’t think it was a tactic; I think there was a production thing going on, but it certainly worked as a pitch tactic for a room full of music industry folks [laughs]. And they came on, and obviously super visually striking, and I just thought to myself, “What is this going to be?” And it was instantly super fun, super engaging.

The music is a real sweet spot of so many different things that I like. My musical history goes from everything from garage rock, math rock, and experimental electronic music, and it really touched on so many different points of that. People were just enthralled by it. And those elements, and particularly the combination of how great the music was, and how much of a community they were already building in Quebec, felt like such an important thing. It really felt like a real moment.

I was already thinking about the people that I could connect them to over in Europe as they were playing, went over and spoke to Seb [Collin], the manager after the show, and had a quick chat. Actually, I was chatting to Emilie [Asselin of Spectacles Bonzaï], who is also on the management team throughout the rest of the week. As soon as I got back to the UK, I emailed them straight away and got on a few calls and started working with them in December last year.

We hear about bidding wars for label and publishing deals. I imagine in this instance there were a lot of booking agencies wanting to work with them, or were you just that early? D.S. : There were a few other agents at that show. I know Simon Raymond from Bella Union [UK record label] was also at the show and that’s how John [Bongiorno] came on board because Simon was texting John, saying, “You have to check this out.” I know that management were speaking to some other agencies. To be honest, I’m not totally privy to how many or who they were talking to, but it was still really early days at that point. The KEXP session [for the Seattle radio station] came February ‘26, so it was long before that. Still, relatively unknown, I think they had like 10,000 monthly Spotify listeners. The first album had been out for a good year or so at that point. I think everyone who was there, everyone who had seen the show, and obviously people like John who knew people who had seen the show, were feeling really excited about it, but I’m not sure that it had got to a point where that had started to spread within the industry quite yet.

Steven, how did you get involved? S.H. A month later, in January, I got a call from the Montreal Jazz fest because I needed a support band for one of my shows I had booked, Goat, from Sweden, a psych rock band who also wear masks. The promoter [Mathieu Rousseau] for Jazz Fest sent me Angine De Poitrine to support the show and praised them, but also mentioned they wore masks. I hadn’t even listened to it; I just sent it along to Goat, flagged that they also wore masks and had left it.

I hadn’t heard back from them and kind of forgot about it. A week later Goat replied, saying they were good to have them on the bill. Then, I went to listen to it and I’m like, “Oh this is amazing.” So, I reached back out to Jazz Fest and I’m like, “They’re awesome, we’d love to have them.” Jazz Fest then told me they had to rescind the offer because Angine had put up their own show in Montreal and it sold out in about an hour, and that they have other plans now. At that point, I just reached out to AdP directly [Collin] and we started chatting and hit it off. The show that they booked and sold out ended up being this last April, which was the record release show [April 3 at Club Soda], which John and I were at. It was the first time I had seen them live, so it’s how the dots connected from there.

The Feldman Agency has to work with closely with Roam. Under normal circumstances, you have a new act, they sell out a small venue, you increase to a slightly bigger venue and so on, but Angine de Poitrine is a runaway train. You don’t want to kill their careers by capitalizing on everything. You want them to have a big, long career. How do you approach such a different case, where they’re selling out everywhere and you can’t really control it? John Bongiorno : We communicated early on. The four of us were all on the same page when it came to this, about the importance of a longer story, and not a short story. I would use analogy of the Sopranos were nine seasons long, and that’s what we want here. We don’t want to be on season 7, episode 2 in three weeks, which if we would have gone with the terrain on that, might have happened. We’re all on the same page that our job is to elongate this career, even though they’re in the eye of the storm right now. So Ethan and I, who work together in the United States, we’re using the terms discipline and restraint. The end result of that was we would go on to Reddit, or we would go on to their fan groups, which are tens of thousands of people at this point, and we’d see these comments of, “Why aren’t they just doing the thing that they can do?” And the answer has always been “because we want to tell a longer story, and it’s not necessarily doing everything just because you can do it.”

We’ve changed our approach multiple times over the course of this because it is unique in its trajectory. We use that word a lot in this business, where a new band, they run dormant for a while, and all of a sudden, they have this upward trajectory, and then you do the things that you’re taught to do, and through years of experience, are the right things to do. But with this, the trajectory was so steep that we found ourselves always being mindful of not skipping steps as best as we possibly could.

This must be of concern to two guys — or aliens — who have reportedly been playing together for 20 years since they were 13, in other projects. They don’t want be, “Oh, shit, we’ve put on these wacky masks and costumes and now our career flamed out.” Is there anything specific that you changed for them? Ethan Berlin : What John was talking about. We’ve had to certainly redefine the steps along the way. And a lot of that has come with the confidence that the band can play, and they put on a very engaging show. Once we all started seeing shows, it was obvious that they could command these different room sizes. A lot of that fear of putting them in to bigger rooms and then just falling flat on their face was eliminated immediately.

So you’d rather create that demand and sell out, like the three July shows in Toronto at Mod Club [cap. 600] and then sell out History (cap. 2500) in November, versus headlining their own show at RBC Amphitheatre [cap. 16,000] and potentially not selling out. E.B.: Stevebooks them in Canada, but similar thought process here. They’re playing Riot Festival (40K-cap) in Chicago in September, but then their first headline show ever in the city of Chicago is two nights at The Salt Shed [Nov. 29-30], which is 3,300 tickets a night.

And that’s a big place to start. But, at a certain point, we had to just say, “This is what it is. Let them go through what they’re about to go through over the next few week

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/09/15/angine-de-poitrine-313-year-old-space-aliens-melt-faces-sell-out-first-global-tour/)._