You’ve conquered the world at least once, with an indelible summer hit called “Young Folks” that sat on the pursed and whistling lips of nearly every human being on the planet. What next? If you’re Peter Morén, lead whistler and vocalist with Peter Bjorn and John, you hoist an acoustic guitar and retreat to the bedroom for the confessional solo album.

“To me, it’s back to the roots,” Morén elaborates, calling from a tour stop in Manchester, England. “That’s how I started. I used to play private parties and small restaurants when I was a teenager and I didn’t have a band.”

The 31-year-old has just released The Last Tycoon, a collection of placid, folk-inspired tunes that began two years ago with Morén aiming to do something in a Bert Jansch vein. Naturally, the pop-literate Swede colours outside the lines occasionally, but not too much. If album opener “Reel to Real” recalls Tim Hardin, or “Missing Link” sounds like a mating of Elliott Smith and Cat Stevens, Morén can’t help but add drums and velocity to the single “Social Competence”. The results in that case will satisfy anybody’s jones for the hooky pleasures of Peter Bjorn and John’s breakout album, Writer’s Block.

But he mostly shows grim restraint in numbers like “Old Love”, where pop-friendly chord changes take a back seat to the album’s reflective, unhurried groove. Embellishments come in the shape of harmonica, synth, some percussion, musical saw, and the heavy reverb of “My Match”, but Morén consistently opts for less over more.

“The idea of the album was to do songs the way I write them, rather than change them around and put on a lot of drums or make it poppy,” Morén explains. “The way the album sounds is the way I write songs at home. I just love to play more fingerpicking, folky guitar, and I listen to a lot of that kind of music. And 90 percent of the songs were recorded live with guitar and vocals, or vocals and piano. With the band, we do the band arrangement and then put the vocal on last. This way makes the voice and lyrics more meaningful, I think. That was important to me, to have that in the centre, like the essentials of the song.”

True to the nature of the beast he’s tackling, Morén’s songs are personal and largely dour in their concerns. Still, it’s the artifice in The Last Tycoon that commands the attention, such as the faux Dylanese of the singer’s favourite track, “This Is What I Came For” (“To have six verses and be more wordy… I don’t think I would have written a song like that for the band,” he says), or the record-nerd’s-wet-dream marriage of Leonard Cohen and Serge Gainsbourg in “Le Petit Coeur”. Morén even confesses that writing in English “puts something between yourself and the words”.

But that’s not to suggest a lack of sincerity beneath The Last Tycoon, and Morén is clearly very comfortable with the stripped-down format. “I think it’s a way of maturing,” he states. “With these shows, I see myself in 10 years’ time, and I feel this is something I can do growing old without being pathetic.”

Peter Morén plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Monday (April 28).