It was just supposed to be a little hiatus.

In February, José González released Vestiges and Claws, his first new solo LP since 2007’s In Our Nature. The Swedish singer-songwriter was far from idle in the years between, and he didn’t spend all that time meticulously crafting the 10 songs that make up his spare, meditative new record. Instead, he made two albums with his long-running band Junip (which also includes drummer Elias Araya and keyboardist Tobias Winterkorn).

He also collaborated with Göteborg String Theory and contributed a number of songs to the soundtrack of Ben Stiller’s 2013 remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

It all added up to a much longer gap between solo records than González ever intended.

“I wanted to do a Junip album and then go back to my solo stuff again pretty soon, but writing, recording, and touring with the first Junip album took about three years,” he says, reached on his cellphone at a tour stop in Madison, Wisconsin. “And then at the end of that album cycle we talked about this continuing, just because the touring felt like it had made us better musicians, and we didn’t want to stop there, so we went and did the second Junip album instead of me going back to my solo stuff. Something that could have taken maybe two, three years took, I guess, seven years.”

Long-time fans will find themselves on familiar ground with Vestiges and Claws. Like the singer’s previous outings, it focuses on González’s assured, soothing vocals and his unhurried, delicate nylon-string guitar work. Recorded mostly by the artist himself at his home studio in Gothenburg, the album boasts a warm, intimate sound that González jokingly refers to as his “mushy” aesthetic.

Lyrically, the songwriter has returned to his signature musings on the Big Questions. González has always preferred to take a holistic view, examining the beauty and frailty of humanity rather than probing the endless depths of his own navel.

“When I was writing this album, I really felt like I was continuing what I started with In Our Nature—songs like ‘The Nest’ and ‘Abram’ and ‘How Low’. I really feel like the lyrics are just continuing the same type of questioning and angles that I explored with that album, and also in many of the Junip songs.”

González is an atheist, but with songs like “Leaf Off/The Cave”—which, with its refrain of “Let the light lead you out,” draws equally from Plato and the biblical book of Genesis—he suggests that there is wisdom to be gleaned from various belief systems, including those that leave room for the divine.

“It’s kind of fun to think how someone else would interpret the same lyric,” he muses. “I find it fun to think about a believer maybe thinking about ‘the light’ as God or something else and still being able to sing along, while I’m thinking more of enlightenment and how we can know ourselves on the planet and make the best of this time we have here.”

José González plays a sold-out Imperial on Saturday (April 25).