Sehore Connects Coleridge, Poetry, and Fraudulent Calls

One of the harder things about writing a short song is deciding how much information the listener actually needs. You might have a specific experience you want to describe, a relationship you want to examine, or an idea that could probably fill an entire album if you allowed yourself enough time to explain it.

But when the finished track is supposed to last around two minutes, those decisions matter, and I think there’s something interesting about what an artist chooses to leave out. Spanish experimental pop project Sehore takes that approach in an unusual direction on its new single “Margaritas,” which incorporates poetry, romantic attraction, and the increasingly familiar annoyance of fraudulent phone calls.

Released on October 20, “Margaritas” is the latest single from Sehore’s upcoming fifteen-track album Ptkbdglmnr, scheduled for November 20, 2026. The project formed in 2025 and has already released two albums, Ladencia and Husfikbur, exploring unconventional musical scales, dissonance, and experimental songwriting. Its latest release draws inspiration from a passage attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the compressed writing of Japanese haiku, while the larger album includes short recordings built around bass, drums, guitar, and vocals, alongside a series of instrumental synthesizer pieces influenced by contemporary dance. Even the album title is intentional: Sehore describes Ptkbdglmnr as an acronym designed to avoid conventional algorithmic recognition.

I wanted to understand how these decisions relate to the writing, particularly why fraudulent phone calls became part of what Sehore describes as a romantic situation and how the literary references communicated that idea in such a short time.

There are some pretty unusual explanations along the way, but I think the most worthwhile part of the conversation concerns how an artist decides what belongs in a song when there is very little time to communicate it.

Interview With Sehore

What inspired the idea of moving between Coleridge’s poetry and the Haiku on “Margaritas”?

Gastronomy. If you mix French fries with tomato sauce, you get a star dish. Although in this case, combining these two ingredients might only guarantee a star-shaped aftertaste.

Coleridge is credited with a short poem that works as an allegory of the border between imagination and reality, or the Cartesian divide separating the dream state from wakefulness. The idea is: If in a dream you pick a flower, and upon waking you still hold it… then what? In this track, the line becomes: “And if you dream within a dream, and it comes true when you wake up, then what would you say?”

For the enumeration, similar in spirit to Kubla Khan, moving between the senses and describing the surrounding environment in a twilight state of drowsiness, the strategy is urgency. The track lasts around one hundred and twenty seconds, so the scene must be synthesized in very few words. The haiku becomes a tool that allows the situation to be evoked without articles, naming only the essential nouns.

This mixture is less eclecticism and more a kind of syncretism… or maybe not.

How did the idea of criticizing fraudulent calls shape the lyrics, music, or overall atmosphere of the song?

Intrusive advertising has invaded everyday life in Western society. Here, the critique appears subtly in three lines that run across the song: it’s mentioned, invoked, connoted without denoting. It seems the song is talking about something else, and the rest is an added detail.

A phenomenon that has become part of daily life is normalized: “We meet at the hour of the fraudulent calls.” In a natural environment, the dominant sounds might well be telephones: “Phones ring and wake me up.” It’s a customary element that forms part of emotional memory: “And I remember our day, the day of the fraudulent calls.”

The song speaks of the idealism of someone who feels attraction and of the biological mechanism that pushes them toward wanting to exchange electrons to form new molecules, or simply to adopt a more committed posture toward the other person. All of this is mediated by companies (which don’t offer company at all, but rather unease) that use fraudulent calls to extract atoms of money by charging people to answer.

The supposed romanticism that colonizes the song is interrupted by unpredictable sounds from unknown numbers and undesirable prefixes. In the culinary recipe of the track, this portion acts as fast-acting insulin to prevent an attack of amorous hyperglycemia in the patient-listener.

How does “Margaritas” fit into the larger sound and concept of Ptkbdglmnr?

In the album Ptkbdglmnr (an acronym of PeTaCa-BoDeGa-LiMoNeRo, designed to dodge the algorithm), there is a kind of holism composed, on one hand, of short tracks, around two minutes, recorded with bass, drums, guitar, and voice.

On the other hand, there is the synthesizer series titled Splash (with its counterparts Splesh, Splish, Splosh, and Splush), based on Pina Bausch’s contemporary dance choreographies. These tracks, rather than developing a motif, transform states of sonic matter, moving from consonance to noise by means of gradual metamorphoses. They have no lyrics; they are instrumental.

Meanwhile, the shorter tracks cover themes such as diversity (like Inclusión 1, continued as Inclusión 2 on the fourth album), deportations, oil-driven opportunism, or the routine that degrades a relationship and leads to justifying an unconsented infidelity. “Margaritas” describes the moment just before that situation. It is the summary of a description, a chapter that completes the season.