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The Rise of Angine de Poitrine: The Inside Story Behind Their Unprecedented Global Breakthrough
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Dressed in their signature polka dot costumes, they walk onstage at Rebel to accept the award from FACTOR president and CEO Meg Symsyk. They pause briefly in front of the microphone as people wonder if the band — always masked, costumed, anonymous and mostly wordless — will give some sort of speech. Instead, standing alongside drummer Klek de Poitrine, guitarist Khn de Poitrine reaches up and makes the band’s signature diamond symbol, queuing an explosion of confetti.
As with everything the band has done in the last five months, it doesn’t take long for this moment to go viral.
It’s the first award Angine de Poitrine have received outside of Quebec, and it’s not hard to see why they’ve earned it. Since the beginning of 2026, there’s been no hotter band in the world. They’ve earned millions upon millions of streams, praise from idols from Jack White to Shania Twain (more on that later), sold out concerts in seconds and, with somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 fans, even set a record for the biggest crowd at Montreal International Jazz Festival since Stevie Wonder in 2009.
Looking out at the audience, the band’s manager, Sébastien Collin, was amazed at the turnout — not just because of the size of the crowd, but the fact that they had come to see this band. Instrumental microtonal math-rock isn’t the kind of music that usually draws numbers, but Angine de Poitrine have shown there’s an appetite out there for adventurous, virtuosic and just plain weird music. The band’s mix of looping pedals, double-necked guitar/bass and virtuosic musicianship is a sight and sound to behold.
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“When I was backstage, I was really happy to see so many people enjoying complex music and heavy rock riffs,” he tells Billboard Canada. “With so many people there of all ages, it’s impossible that it was only people who like that type of genre that were there. It’s so much wider. It shows that maybe there will be some more openness to really good ideas and really good music.”
Like the band, Collin has become somewhat of an unlikely celebrity over the past five months. When people see him, they will often chant “Seeee-bast-tiennnn,” one of the only words on Angine de Poitrine’s 2026 breakthrough album Vol. II from the song “Fabienk.” The man behind the management, live music production and record label company Spectacles Bonzaï has been grinding it out on Quebec’s DIY rock scene for a decade and a half before Angine de Poitrine took things to an unexpected new level.
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Since 2012, Collin has been producing a travelling rock spectacle called Ligue Rock, which put him in touch with the folk-punk band Quebec Redneck Bluegrass Project, another Saguenay band that was then based in China. Each year, he helped bring them to bigger and bigger stages, focusing primarily on the live show. Collin says he booked 100 shows for them in 15 months, and built the label side around them. In a way, it built a template for the last year with Angine de Poitrine: take things step by step, draw in the diehards and, most importantly, never compromise.
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“I’m picky, and I love to work with the best musicians possible,” Collin says. “The more creative, the less compromise they have in their music.”
Angine de Poitrine photographed by Gabriel Di Sante at Billboard Canada Power Players in Toronto in June 2026.
Collin knew the men behind the Angine masks for years as part of the Quebec rock scene. To preserve the mystique, he won’t say exactly when they met, but he was there from nearly day one. He saw their “beta” shows before the pandemic and realized that if the band had a proper live producer behind them, the music could travel throughout Quebec. Soon, he became their manager.
At first, that was the ambition. They’d play throughout the province, and each time they returned to a city they’d have a bigger crowd. Angine de Poitrine carried that indie band momentum throughout 2025.
They played local shows and built a local following that started to turn heads in the local industry. It was slower-burning at first, but there was a definitely spark before the explosion.
At POP Montreal in August of last year, they played on the rooftop of the Ubisoft building in Montreal for a crowd of fans and industry insiders, including the booker of Seattle radio station KEXP’s popular live music sessions.
The buzz was building by the time they were chosen as an Official Selection band for M for Montreal in partnership with Billboard Canada in November, and there was a lineup of both fans and industry professionals outside Ausgang Plaza where they played with the band Patche. Afterward, the festival says, the band signed two international booking deals, then later played M for Montreal's FACTOR-supported showcase at The Great Escape in the U.K. this year.
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"Angine de Poitrine captures the spirit of what M for Montreal embodies: the power to turn local momentum into international opportunity," write M for Montreal's artistic director/music programmer Mikey Rishwain Bernard and international strategic alliances manager Lori Éthier in a joint statement to Billboard Canada. "Their showcase helped propel the band into 2026 with new international booking representation and key industry connections."
When the band played the Trans Musicales festival in France at the end of the year, they reconnected with KEXP to shoot their live session, two months before it was posted on YouTube.
Collin and the band knew that when people saw the band playing live that it was going to excite the kind of true music heads who get excited for rock outside of the usual box. But no one could have been prepared for the popular explosion when the KEXP performance video went up in February, 2026.
“A global breakthrough is not something you can plan for,” he says.
It went viral nearly instantly, and the band, then largely unknown outside of their home province, racked up millions of streams. Currently, the YouTube video sits at 17 million views.
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“The launch of KEXP and the virality of it, that was the marker,” says Collin. “We could see, oh, something’s happening.”
He says the moment it went up, his inbox exploded. Overnight, he had messages from venues, festivals, merchandise producers and fans from all over the world.
The Vol. II album was planned for launch in April, just two months after the video went up. The band had to act quickly. With so many eyes watching, how would they meet the moment?
Angine de Poitrine photographed by Gabriel Di Sante at Billboard Canada Power Players in Toronto in June 2026.
“We had to grow in a logical way and not overwhelm the band with too many decisions too fast,” Collin says.
The ecosystem around Angine de Poitrine was growing rapidly. They had to find the right partners to press the vinyl, distribute it, construct Khn de Poitrine’s custom guitars, make merch and posters for each show, book concerts throughout the world, register for publishing and figure out next steps — all at a much more monumental scale than they, or most people in the music industry, could be ready for.
The biggest decision was whether to release the album on a record label. Everyone wanted to sign Angine de Poitrine. That’s not an exaggeration.
“I can say that every major and most of the big indies all contacted us. Smaller indies, too. It was quite a rush. I was having around 10 meetings per week, all on the label side,” Collin says, breaking into a laugh. “It was quite fun to have a lot of them saying how long they had been following Angine de Poitrine, while the reality was many of them had discovered them two days ago.”
Collin compares the experience to speed dating, but with the extra pressure of having to get married at the end. The clock was ticking and they had to make a choice. In the end, they chose to go with no one. They would do it how they’d been doing it since day one: independently.
“We needed to talk to all the labels to choose none of them,” he says.
The band is open to signing with a label in the future, but for now it makes sense to keep pushing and see what they can do on their own. This way, they can keep authority in their own hands and partner with or hire the people they need to. They set up their own distribution partnerships to release the album (with many record shops opening up throughout the U.S. at midnight to sell the vinyl album when it was given a wide physical release in June), signed a publishing deal with Montreal company Third Side Music, signed with The Feldman Agency for booking and continued to expand the team at Spectacles Bonzaï.
“I prefer hiring as many people as we need, and giving those jobs to people here,” Collin explains. “The money stays in Canada, or in Quebec.”
A big part of his job now is saying no. That includes some huge arena and stadium offers opening for major rock stars to instead play their own headlining shows.
“What do we prefer,” Collin asks, “to play in front of 50,000 people that don’t come to see you and having the chance to seduce them with a 30 minute opening set, or to invite 2,000 people to come see a real Angine de Poitrine show?”
They chose the latter, more accessible route, one where tickets can be affordable for fans to come see them as they grow. “It’s more respectful for the first wave of fans.”
Their commitment to doing things on their own terms hasn't slowed their momentum. In fact, it's amplified it.
In June, just weeks after their Billboard Canada award acceptance and one week before their record-breaking Montreal Jazz Fest set, Angine de Poitrine had their second biggest viral on-camera performance on long-running BBC live music program Later… with Jools Holland in the U.K.
The band again captivated millions with their whimsical performance, but this time they appeared alongside another Canadian icon: Shania Twain. The singer became their unlikely co-star for a pre-show interview segment and was later caught on camera visibly mesmerized, smiling and bopping her head as Khn triggers his looping pedal with his polka dot foot.
When asked about the moment in an interview with Billboard Canada about her new album Little Miss Twain, her eyes light up.
“Angine de Poitrine! I love them," Twain says. "First of all, they're extraordinary musicians. They are mind-blowing musicians, actually... [They're] a duo that plays their butts off. They're very intellectual players, and they're having a great time with it. They’re entertaining us all in every way.
"As people, they're so cool," she continues. "It was a real pleasure to meet them... I was inspired by them. I was really, really proud of them. And here we [were as] Canadians on this incredible, historic show."
It's another huge boost to their growing profile, but where some bands might cancel their previously booked engagements as they level up, Angine de Poitrine have instead just added to them. They've hit warp speed.
Let's look at last week alone. They made their highly anticipated Toronto debut opening for Jack White at RBC Amphitheatre last Tuesday (July 15), then immediately dashed to the Mod Club for their own very-sold-out headlining concert. It was a packed, sweaty, instantly engaging concert that helped build buzz throughout the week. They were back for two more shows at the venue later in the week, played a main stage show at Ottawa Bluesfest, added a surprise last-minute concert at FIFA Fan Fest in Toronto on Sunday (July 19) and again did double duty as they headed to Guelph, Ontario for a headlining performance at Hillside Festival in Guelph later that night. All in all, it was seven shows in less than a week.
"They’re at a point where they don't even know how many shows in a row they can do because they've never really been put to the test," their booking agent Steven Himmelfarb told Billboard Canada back in Aprili. "It’s wide open right now."
Collin knows there will be some much bigger Angine de Poitrine shows in the future, but they’re not eager to go into those venues before the time is right. In a lot of ways, the Montreal Jazz Festival concert was a test, and one they passed with flying colours.
“Now we know they can play for such a big audience, that they’re good enough and that we can make it work,” he says. “It’s not just about the music. It’s about the roadies and the tour manager, the video and the light and the sound, all the production crew. Are we good enough to play to 100,000 people? The answer was yes. Now we are confident that there's no limits.”
They're already heavy favourites for the Polaris Music Prize and a hit on multiple Billboard charts, all on an independent level.
Before they are ready to sign with a label, they want to see how much they can achieve on their own. Then, they can gauge if it’s worth parting with that autonomy to put power into anyone else’s hands.
“Then we can know what result we can have by ourselves and what's the worth of that,” he explains. ”And in the future if we do want to sign, we can say ‘hi label, we did this by ourselves. What can you offer that is better than that?’”
The day after Billboard Canada Power Players, Collin accepts the Manager on the Rise award at Billboard Canada Managers to Watch and gives an impassioned speech about the potential of Angine de Poitrine as a bridge between Quebec and the rest of Canada. There are a lot of great bands in Quebec, he says, speaking to the Toronto audience, they just need to be discovered. The success of Angine de Poitrine shows that there is no playbook. You don’t have to choose between making music without compromise and gaining global popularity. You can do both.
Stepping offstage, Collin is immediately surrounded by major players from the industry wanting to meet him and congratulate him. He's proud of Angine de Poitrine and what they had accomplished, the part he's played in it, but he can also feel pride and energy from the other industry players in the room. It feels like a collective accomplishment, a marker that the only limit on our triumphs is the limit of our ambition.
“Even if it's not their success, it's a success of the industry,” he says, pausing for a moment to correct himself. “Really, it’s a success of the music. But the industry is full of music fans. We’ve shown that a band can do this without compromise, to make a breakthrough like this, and that a passionate, small, DIY team can manage it. That makes people happy.”
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