Becky drove up from San Diego without a ticket.
She parked near the Teragram Ballroom in downtown Los Angeles at 1:03 p.m. on Tuesday, ran to Target, and was back in front of the venue by 2:34 p.m. — nearly six hours before doors, in 90-degree heat, for a show she hadn’t managed to buy her way into. She’d spent weeks watching resale prices climb on this sellout.
“This is disgusting,” the 37-year-old scoffed.
She got scammed. She came anyway, and spent the afternoon handing out water and Nerds Gummy Clusters to the strangers baking from the heat beside her.
Frank, 52, paid $375 on StubHub for a ticket that was never delivered. He was in line too, hoping for a miracle at will call.
By late afternoon, the queue had wrapped from West 7th Street onto Hartford Avenue. Attendees wore polka dot outfits, a few hats with hot-dog noses, and their ages ranged from toddler to retiree. They were all waiting for Khn and Klek de Poitrine — better known as Angine de Poitrine, a two-piece of thirtysomethings from Saguenay, Quebec who perform as 333-year-old aliens and have become, perhaps, the most in-demand live music act on the planet.
According to StubHub, Los Angeles is the band’s single strongest market worldwide, accounting for roughly a fifth of all resale tickets sold across their 47-date global tour. That’s double the share of the next closest city. These two Teragram nights ranked first and second in demand on the entire run. Compared to the 137 other events the venue has hosted over the past 12 months, they moved about 1,100 percent more resale tickets per show.
For a room that holds 625 people. On a weeknight.
What everyone came to hear is microtonal math rock. Khn plays a custom double-neck guitar-bass with twice the usual number of frets on each side, looping the two halves together in real time with foot pedals. Klek plays drums in time signatures that would bedevil a seasoned rhythm section. Nothing is pre-recorded. Every layer is built live, in costume, with limited visibility.
Josh Martin for Rolling StoneThe outfits get the attention. Khn’s golden braids spilling out from beneath an inverted pyramid, Klek looking like the medieval lovechild of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker, both of them covered in black and white spots — on their clothes and their limbs — and adorned with golden triangles.
Their manager, Sébastien Collin, compares the experience to picking which Christmas present to open.
“The wrap made you choose the gift, but it’s not a gimmick,” he says. “There’s real music inside.”
Martin, a working musician standing third in line, described his own unwrapping. A friend had been badgering him for weeks to watch the band’s KEXP session. He finally pressed play on his phone.
“Within 10 seconds I’m like, ‘What is this garbage?’”
Two seconds later: “My life has just changed.”
He’s not alone. The KEXP video — one take, recorded at the Trans Musicales festival in Rennes, France, last December and posted on Feb. 5 — has surpassed 18 million views on YouTube. The comments section runs some 73,000 entries deep, with people talking themselves out of contempt in real time.
But the story doesn’t start there.
By the time they went viral, Angine de Poitrine had already taken French Canada. In the summer of 2025, they played 25 shows around Quebec, repeatedly drawing overflow crowds to festival side stages that proved too small for them. They sold more than 5,000 tickets to an April 2026 tour of the province before Christmas, including consecutive sellouts at Montreal’s Club Soda.
Meanwhile, record stores couldn’t keep their first album in stock. When Vol. II was available on vinyl worldwide in June, two months after its digital release, the band pulled it from their own website so only shops could sell it. Some stayed open until midnight to do so.
Josh Martin for Rolling Stone
That same month, Angine de Poitrine drew tens of thousands to their set at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the largest crowd there since Stevie Wonder in 2009.
Their first American show came on July 31 at the Newport Jazz Festival. Since then, they’ve played back-to-back sellouts in Denver and had crowds at Field of Vision, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Colorado festival, chanting “Ho-ly shit!” in unison.
Those chants surfaced again inside the Teragram, after a hectic “Yor Zarad” that opened the night’s first mosh pit like a vortex on the dancefloor. So did the inflatable dice that had been bouncing around the crowd at Field of Vision over the weekend.
Before the set, fans crowded the stage to watch the pair assemble their own gear, still masked but not yet in full costume. Whenever Khn and Klek raised their hands into triangles, everyone on the floor raised triangles back. When they squatted during “Tamebsz,” the floor squatted. When they waved their arms through “Fabienk” — the song whose near-intelligible vocal sounds like “See-bas-tieeeeen,” a nod to their manager — the crowd waved and chanted his name. Every sip they took through tubes rigged to their water bottles, engineered for drinking through their masks, drew pleas from fans in the front rows for a splash.
Becky and Frank were among them. They would both go home happy (Becky even got her money back), as would 600 or so of their newest and sweatiest friends.
Some were already chattering about hitting Angine de Poitrine’s two nights at the Wiltern in December.
Those shows? Sold out, too.
