Recently, Angine de Poitrine had to get new heads. The alien-looking rock duo were not in fact born with the monochrome polka-dotted complexions and extruded faces that millions of listeners have obsessed over since they went viral this spring. Guitarist Khn has a long, twangable nose and double-necked guitar/bass; drummer Klek’s dangly proboscis bounces along to his stone-cold playing. Both are apparently 333-year-old time travellers primarily inspired by a solemn musical quartet of monkeys from Borneo. Over months of hard gigging, their handmade papier-mache masks had gone soggy from the musicians’ laboured breathing. “When I looked at mine, I was like: Jesus Christ, did I really play that much with this?” says Klek. “It was falling apart. It was like putting a Christmas box outside when it’s raining.”

But when the masks disintegrated, it was important that their more robust replacements still looked lived-in. “People have fallen in love with the band as it’s always been,” says Khn. “So we’re not gonna change everything [because] we have a bigger budget now. We’re emotionally attached to our old beaten-up costumes that have been in car accidents and are full of snot. We think people love the fact that you can feel they have lived.”

In just a few months, Angine de Poitrine’s lore has entered the annals of rock iconography alongside the likes of Kiss, the Residents and Daft Punk. In February, US radio station KEXP published a video of the anonymous duo performing at a French festival: 27 minutes of ludicrously tight, swerving, looping grooves played by two figures who look like some ungodly union of Jar Jar Binks and Dada pioneer Hugo Ball. There was undoubtedly a novelty factor, but novelty alone can’t fuel you to 13.7m YouTube views. Those are pop-star numbers for genuinely freaky music, a prog-club sound that takes its wayward undertow from Khn’s microtonal musicianship – playing the notes between the notes, a mode historically found in eastern music – and Klek’s sewing-machine needle drumming.

Since forming in 2019, Angine have rejected attempts to unmask them and generally make media appearances in full regalia, emitting alien gargles deciphered by an “interpreter”. So it’s a surprise when the Francophone duo appear by video from their Quebec hometown of Saguenay one Tuesday morning in terrestrial getup, in their respective terrestrial homes, speaking English and looking like any two punk lifer dudes from your own local scene. Khn permanently twirls an unlit cigarette. Going Angine mode takes too much work for a 10am call. They still do their own body paint for gigs. “It’s funny, sometimes we’re playing shows just 25 minutes, but just preparing usually takes an hour,” says Klek.

In April, they released their second album, Vol II, cementing their reputation as alternative music’s most talked-about thing apart from perhaps Geese. It delighted prog nerds tickled by the audible traces of Frank Zappa and Gentle Giant; riff maniacs who have made a cult out of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard; and – the ultimate sign of success – children giddy at the whole package. Their rise is a feelgood story of human craftsmanship and fun for its own sake thriving in a miserable landscape of cruelty and AI slop. Joy itself might be the TikTok clip of two kids who attached cable ties to their guitar necks, creating microtonal frets so they could properly cover Angine’s new song Sarniezz. “I’m proud of that,” says Klek, “of people enjoying it like it’s supposed to be.”

But they’re nonplussed by the hype: even the luthier who made Khn’s microtonal double-necked guitar has become a figure of obsession; no wonder the creator of their new masks wants to remain unknown. “It’s only music. I’m not saving people’s lives,” Klek continues. “I’m just playing drums. One comment on KEXP said: ‘Now there’s a reason to live.’ I was like: calm down, man. Go kiss your mother or something – that’s a reason to live.”

Rabid fans have worked out who they are, but the fun of Angine is that they’re mysterious and inventive. The sleuthing, says Klek, makes him feel like when he asked for an Xbox for Christmas as a kid. “I really badly wanted to know if I had it, so I undo the tapes on my wrappings and take a look. It was like: oh yeah, I had it. Then I closed it back up and for a week I was like: why did I do that? Where’s the surprise now? There is a thing that is interesting in not knowing. And you find out who we are and you’re like … oh. We’re not Lady Gaga. We’re not Elton John. We’re two random dudes.”

I was prepared to spend an hour freestyling with two characters about their alien lore: Angine’s love of hotdogs, triangles, what they’ve called their “exotic tans”. But the duo are resolutely chill: Khn nonchalant, Klek analytical. If anything, they resist burnishing the backstory. That’s for fans to evolve. “I’m down with what people are lore-ing about the project,” says Klek. “It’s fuckin’ free, it’s open source!” In that sense, they seem a lot like King Gizz, another group of friends that started on a lark and let fans play in their world.

More revealing than Angine’s government identities is the world that shaped them: 21 years ago, in nearby La Baie, Khn, then 13, and Klek, 14, met through a mutual friend. He knew a guy with a drum kit and told Khn: “We should play music with him. Why not?” says Khn. “I ended up at Klek’s mother’s place making music in the basement, and we started doing that for … for ever.”

They were obsessed with goofing off musically, young prog fans revelling in playing complicated music and satirising Gaga, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Zappa; even privately forming a tribute band to the pop-punk outfit of a high-schooler they knew. “We always do caricatures to get a laugh,” says Khn. “It’s a spasm we have often.” Outside the basement, they roamed the forest. “Getting lost, getting hurt,” he says. “Putting your snow shoes on, eating a handful of mushrooms, getting lost in the woods, drying out your clothes besides a fire and burning your mittens.”

The incorporated Saguenay area had a great DIY arts scene. Khn was obsessed with a “mathy, rocky, bluesy, bit wonky rock’n’roll” band called Deux Pouilles en Cavale, whose drum kit was partially made of trash. They loved le parc, another hard-firing instrumental band. The region was surrounded by logging and aluminium factories: did those industrial pistons infiltrate the sound? “People in Saguenay are down for intense, loud music,” says Khn. “If you want to stand out, you have to blend all those influences together.” He cites prog metal band Voivod, until now the area’s biggest musical export. “They bring influences from punk rock, from prog, from a lot of different subgenres. Maybe people here don’t have those barriers.”

Klek and Khn kept playing together, alongside their mutual pal, but didn’t form a band until their early 20s. “For a while, we didn’t take it seriously,” says Klek. “It was just like playing with Legos.”

“Well,” says Khn, “maybe that’s true for you. I was 12 when I picked up a guitar and I instantly became very serious about it. I always had the intention to make a band.” He played with plenty of other serious musicians, but it never compared to noodling in the basement with Klek and their mate. Klek’s resistance drove Khn to distraction. “It was frustrating for me when the most interesting stuff I was doing was with two guys who had no ambition whatsoever.”

Klek couldn’t see himself as a musician. “I didn’t have idols or people to follow in their path,” he says. He was more into woodwork. In time, he realised what a vast part of his life music occupied. “I did a lot of jobs, but never did driving trucks or planting trees as much as playing music.”

One day, when Klek was living in Montreal, he called Khn, living in Rimouski, more than 300 miles away. Khn had been sending him clips of his jams. “He said: ‘That was actually pretty good,’” Khn recalls. “‘You know, we could have started a band.’ Sometimes you just feel like, hey! I could have done this?” He mimics the penny dropping: “Oh, I could do this, it’s not too late.”

When Klek said that, Khn recalls, “I was like a puddle of gas, and I just needed that spark. That’s when I showed up at his mother’s place on Monday at 7am and I spent the entire week there grinding away: let’s do it now, because maybe tomorrow he’s gonna say maybe not.”

Their first band ran from about 2013. By 2019, Khn and Klek were both back in the “special” Saguenay area. (Montreal, says Klek, has “too many people, too many exhausts, too much cement.”) Their main band had already played a gig one week when they got an opportunity to play another days later. “It’s a small town,” says Khn. “You can’t play the same venue in a two-week span.” They had a microtonal side project – Klek had made the guitar himself – and just needed a disguise.

Their previous full-time band had a reputation for making gigantic papier-mache structures to be destroyed in the pit. “Like a huge-ass piñata, bigger than everyone,” says Klek. So, says Khn, “it was natural for us to think: we need costumes”. They stuck their hands in buckets of flour and water without any plan: “Every aspect of the aesthetic was like: oh yeah, we could do this! Ha ha ha!” One of the spare guitar necks Klek had used for their homemade guitar was covered in polka dots – not designed that way, says Khn, but clearly the DIY handiwork of “a guy on drugs trying to kill time. We thought: we’re gonna put polka dots everywhere, it’s gonna be funny.”

“You do it, then you think later!” says Klek, and they both crack up. They retired their previous band in 2022 as Angine took over, then released Angine’s debut, Vol 1, in 2024.

Klek and Khn are lifelong jammers. Most Angine songs start that way. “We improvise and make a lot of crap, then you have a little spark,” says Khn. “A lot of the songs on the second album, I found one riff that’s got something to it, then you build from that.”

Building up these loops, says Klek, “there’s a feeling of anxiousness or something that comes with the repetitions, the frictions with the microtones. We’re always playing with that feeling, and tension and release.” Using a loop pedal live keeps them in line, says Khn. “If I start from this idea, I have to find a coherent way to move away from it.” Otherwise, he says, they have a “tendency to make songs that go from A to Z without coming back to A or B”.

Angine are open about being inspired by King Gizzard’s 2017 album Flying Microtonal Banana. Microtonal virtuosos have been going viral a lot recently: Maddie Ashman, Bryan Deister. The appeal, Klek thinks, is that “it sounds new for people”, though he finds it weird given that this musical system predates the 12-semitone western scale. He can’t say whether listeners are finding it a reassuring counter to AI-generated culture. “Since we are ‘popular’ in a certain way – it’s strange for me to say that – we don’t spend much time on the internet because we have a tight schedule. And sometimes people are … how can I say … angry about Angine. So we’re like: let’s not go on Facebook. People can say what they want.” Khn grins.

Since day one, the duo have recorded and made videos at the longstanding underground music incubator Centre d’Expérimentation Musicale in nearby Chicoutimi. Creative director Guillaume Thibert says the scene was surprised by the way Angine exploded. “It’s historical, it’s completely amazing,” he says. “Especially that they don’t compromise on their art. At their shows, it’s nice to see 70-year-olds, young families with children, hard rock and electronic music fans.” But after it was revealed that acts including Geese and Mk.gee had paid an agency to generate fake TikTok accounts using their music, alternative music fans have become suspicious of unusually quick rises to fame. Angine scoff at any idea they’ve used these schemes. “We don’t even have time for our own TikTok account,” says Klek. “So we definitely won’t spend time for [companies] to make something. We’re really into live playing. That’s pretty much it.”

The strangest thing about their success, he says, is how people have started talking to them: “Life doesn’t revolve around me. Yeah, I’m doing music and people like it, yeah I’m proud of it. But talk to me about your dog!” And they still have day jobs. Klek claims to work inside the yellow arches of the McDonald’s logo; Khn has a small business, which he runs from the road. “I love it and I wouldn’t want to get rid of it.”

This week’s UK tour dates could probably have sold out 10 times over; their autumn tour also sold out instantly. Khn admits to feeling the pressure. “I can’t say we’re being lighthearted and just doing this to have fun, because when you feel this hype, people have anticipation and you’ve got to give them the best. I can’t say my thoughts have been clear of any doubts about: what can I do to make myself a better musician? But what I come back to is that people have fallen in love with the rawness and simplicity.”

The difficulty of playing beneath the masks reflects the band’s ethos to push themselves. “We love challenges,” says Klek. “When it’s too easy, we instinctively make it harder.” What the headpieces lack in breathability they make up for in protection: “It’s easier for me to put this on and go in front of 4,000 people than to do it as myself.” When Klek stresses out about tough shows, Khn reminds him: “‘People had a whole lot of fun.’ And that’s what’s important.”

The pair have never been to the UK before this week. Travelling through airport customs with the masks is fine, they say: they live in suitcases. “But the guitar gets funny questions because I carry it in a sleeping bag and it looks like a dead body,” says Khn. As time travellers, surely that means the 12-hour flight from Quebec will be a jetlag-free click of the fingers. “As time travellers, it’s even worse!” Klek protests. “We’re always jetlagged! A minute passes and we’re like: ‘Oh! It felt like a year!’”