A friendly path through 30 years of math rock and post-rock — the underground lineage that leads straight to Angine de Poitrine.
Open the full playlist on Spotify All tracks, in order →So you found Angine de Poitrine — the duo from Quebec building entire songs in real time on a double-necked microtonal guitar, the band that can slide an entire song from rhythmic chaos into a locked-in disco groove without breaking the underlying loop. They're incredible.
And they're part of a beautiful thirty-year lineage of bands all chasing the same question in different ways — what can a rock band do when the playing itself is the song? Looping techniques, time signatures, tonal experiments, altered instruments — every move Angine de Poitrine makes pulls from somewhere on this path.
What follows is fourteen tracks across five eras. Each one passes a specific piece of musical DNA to whatever comes next. Listen in order. By the time you get to the end, you'll hear Angine de Poitrine differently.
→ Welcome in.
Don Caballero showed that rhythm could be melody. Explosions in the Sky showed that instrumental rock could be cinema. American Football and Minus the Bear made it tender and danceable. El Ten Eleven proved two people with loop pedals could build a whole orchestra in real time.
Battles plugged the whole thing into a synthesizer. LITE and Toe carried it to Tokyo and made it leaner and more emotional. Giraffes? Giraffes! turned the duo format into joyful chaos. Adebisi Shank made it euphoric and electronic — and started a quiet lineage of masked, anonymous instrumental bands. Chon and Polyphia made it virtuosic and clean.
And then Angine de Poitrine pulled all those threads tight at once — the loop pedals, the duo dynamic, the rhythmic mind games, the masked anonymity — and went one step further: retuned the guitar to play in the cracks between piano keys. Melodies no one else in the genre had access to.