Review: Pocket Lint – Wunderkammer

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with the new album Wunderkammer by Pocket Lint, and honestly, it’s one of those records that sticks to you.

Pocket Lint is the musical project of Mark Heffernan, and he’s really crafted something special here. The whole concept is based on the idea of a Wunderkammer, or a “cabinet of curiosities,” where every single song acts like an exhibit in a personal museum. 

It’s an interesting story of how it all came together. Back in the summer of 2020, Mark was sitting on his balcony, literally teaching himself how to make cameos out of amethyst with a bit of sandpaper. After three weeks of “increasing piles of purple powder and sore hands,” he eventually decided to head into the studio instead. That’s how Pocket Lint was born, and the album feels like the result of that kind of quiet, painstaking focus. 

The album is designed to pull you right in. Mark says the start of the record is meant to feel like a “strange character” guiding you into the room. He was reading a lot of Romantic Period poetry—think Shelley and Coleridge—while working on the opening track, and you can really feel that influence in the atmosphere he builds. 

Each track functions as its own little artifact. There’s “From an Ancient Land” setting the stage, followed by “Amethyst Cameo,” which links back to those days on the balcony. Then you have “Cyanometer,” a track about a 19th-century device that measures how ‘blue’ someone is—a machine that legendary figures like Picasso and Yves Klein supposedly tested.

There’s “Clockwork Boy,” which tells the story of an 18th-century automaton Mark found in a Lincoln junk shop, and “Odin’s Eyes,” the story of glass marbles famously won by Maximillian of Bavaria in a game of Bridge. We also have “Butterfly Collection,” a surprisingly touching set of notebooks that a child wrote in 1989 while tracking butterflies in a Shropshire garden.

He even includes the ancient Greek statuette “Nyx?”, the hand-drawn shortcuts on old Irish maps in “(A Cartography of) Desire Paths”, and the self-supporting forest in “Fernery”. The tracklist is rounded out by “Punishing Moonlight” and the final track, “Heartbreak’s First Teardrop,” which is just a perfect, slightly melancholic way to close out the collection. 

It’s the kind of album that feels like it has a soul. It’s got that indie-psych edge, but it really channels the spirit of Bowie and Eno at their most experimental, or perhaps those early, textured moments from Tears for Fears and Talk Talk. It’s a pastoral, classic sound that feels entirely its own—a bit like a curated collection of memories, with every track playing out like a vignette painted in sound. 

If you’re the type of person who loves to sit down with a record and really listen to the details, this is for you. It’s officially out as of June 26th, 2026, and you can grab it on CD via Bandcamp or find it on all the usual streaming sites. It’s a great piece of work, and I think it’s going to be in heavy rotation for me for a while. 

https://pocketlint17.bandcamp.com/album/wunderkammer

Let me know your thoughts.

PNL

MT