Arielle Corbeau: The Artist Behind Angine de Poitrine’s Wonderful Weirdness

Arielle Corbeau draws polka dots by hand, illustrates bizarre pyramids and helps bring the wonderfully strange world of Angine de Poitrine to life. If you’ve seen the Quebec duo’s masked musicians, flaming hot dogs and unmistakable look, you’ve already encountered her work. Now that the band has captured international attention, it’s time to get to know the illustrator behind the madness, and the comics she’s creating when she’s not busy dotting pyramids.

Corbeau illustrated the cover of Vol. II, the band’s sophomore album, and designed the poster for its record-breaking concert at the 2026 Montreal International Jazz Festival. When Khn and Klek appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, their bizarre visual identity reached an even bigger audience. You might not know what to make of the music at first, but the artwork certainly makes you look twice.

Her story with the band goes back to her days as a local fan in Chicoutimi. She watched Khn and Klek perform at the Centre d’expérimentation musicale, where the duo was lighting hot dogs on fire and throwing them into the crowd. You don’t see that every night at a concert. Corbeau grew up in the region, spent time in Montreal and Quebec City drawing bands at underground shows, and eventually returned to Chicoutimi after the pandemic.

She has been making her own mark outside the Angine de Poitrine universe, too. Corbeau has created independent comics, including her self-published zine BOUL & doop #1, and her serialized project The Cat and the Crow has found an audience through Patreon. I’m also curious about Rookies, her first full-length graphic novel. It will be interesting to see what she comes up with when she has an entire book to fill with her own ideas.

The Vol. II cover is a good example of how much work can go into something that might take the rest of us only a few seconds to appreciate. During the Christmas break at the end of 2025, Corbeau had just four days to complete the artwork. Working from a composition by Rémi Sauvé, she drew every single polka dot on the pyramid by hand. Every single dot. I hope she had a good pencil sharpener.

The pyramid has also become a source of online speculation. Fans have tried to connect it to all sorts of things, including a monument associated with the 1996 Saguenay flood. Others seem happy to embrace the whole thing as wonderfully absurd nonsense. Personally, I think part of the appeal is that nobody needs to have all the answers. Sometimes a band can just be strange, and that’s enough.

There’s something rather ironic about Angine de Poitrine’s rise in the age of AI. The group is built one dot at a time, with Corbeau painstakingly drawing the polka dots that help bring its strange visual world to life. A computer might be able to generate a pyramid covered in dots in seconds, but there’s something satisfying about knowing a real person sat down and drew them by hand. Maybe that’s part of the band’s appeal. In a world where so much looks and sounds alike, Angine de Poitrine has found its own wonderfully weird way of standing out.

Angine de Poitrine may have introduced Corbeau’s work to a much bigger audience, but she has plenty going on beyond the band. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Rookies and whatever else she draws next. In the meantime, the rest of us can keep wondering about the pyramid, the sardines and those flaming hot dogs.