Pocket Lint Enters the World of the Goddess of Night With Nyx

Happy readers, I found Mark Heffernan by chance a couple of weeks ago, listening to what he had prepared for release. And now comes the part where “Who’s Mark Heffernan?” strikes in.

Well… despite the lack of syrupy information people seem to crave nowadays, I think you may find your answer by listening to his music. Pocket Lint is the name of Mark’s solo project, and today we’re introducing his latest release, Nyx?, taken from the Wunderkammer album.

From purple dust to Pocket Lint

Mark describes Pocket Lint as a genre-hopping project. That’s cool, already earns a little sympathy from me because I know that particular disease rather well. Its origin story gets better. Pocket Lint started almost by accident.

Back in 2020, Mark somehow got into carving cameos from amethyst. Yep, amethyst. He gave it a proper go too, until the sore hands and all that purple dust suggested that maybe music was the better option. So he went back into the studio instead. Good call, I’d say. Pocket Lint came out of it.

Since then, guitars, synths, pianos and little sounds picked up from the world around him have become his toolkit. Mark calls some of those little sonic details “aural bon-bons.” He also released a soundtrack to an imaginary sci-fi noir film on cassette, because apparently doing things the usual way isn’t really Mark’s thing.

When I first heard it, I was like… Pet Shop Boys, Erasure… anyone? Mark told me he usually hears Soft Cell and Human League instead. Fair enough. I can hear those ghosts too, although Pocket Lint already has a recognisable fingerprint of its own.

A suspicious little statue. Nyx?

Wunderkammer takes each song from an imaginary object that Mark has placed in his own little collection of curiosities. Nyx? takes inspiration from a small Greek statuette supposedly discovered near Megara, once attributed to Aphrodite and later linked to Nyx, goddess of night and daughter of Chaos. So yeah, the question mark is there for a reason.

The lyrics go straight into that uncertainty: “Were you painted midnight blue / decked out for war / spear and helmet too,” before coming back to “Deliver me to sleep” again and again. And then we get this: “You may be the bringer of night / Draped in a flowing black gown.”

I was always excited about this song during the writing process, so I am excited to release it as a single.”
— Mark Heffernan

Yeap – excitement is the right word for all this. There’s mythology here, archaeology, synth-pop, snow dancing on tongues and a figurine nobody seems quite sure about. And somehow, you put all these different ideas together and it works.

Curious about what else Mark has been up to with Pocket Lint? Have a listen to Wunderkammer and take it from there. You can find him on Instagram, Bandcamp, Spotify and YouTube – everything you need is right here.

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