Peter Morén

Peter Morén, who sings and plays guitar for the Stockholm-based trio Peter Bjorn and John, played a central role in shaping some of the strongest and most vibrant pop emerging from Sweden during the early 2000s. Across three albums the group steadily built an audience that surged after the global success of the 2006 single “Young Folks.” Pulling away from the band’s demanding pace, Morén introduced early solo songs at small New York clubs in 2007, shifting toward a folk-leaning, understated sound distinct from his Peter Bjorn and John output. His debut solo effort, The Last Tycoon—named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Love of the Last Tycoon—appeared in April 2008 on Quarterstick Records; the album drew from reflections on youth and carried cover art created by his girlfriend. Morén soon rejoined his primary band, and following Peter Bjorn and John’s 2009 release Living Thing he participated in the enigmatic Swedish supergroup Tutankamon, whose self-titled first album arrived late that year and featured shared songwriting and vocals between Morén and Shout Out Louds’ Adam Olenius. He then resumed solo work with the Swedish-language album I Spåren Av Tåren in 2010. Additional activity included Peter Bjorn and John’s 2011 album Gimme Some and the founding of INGRID, a label and artistic collective that united his bandmates with Lykke Li plus members of the Teddybears and Miike Snow. Morén issued his third solo album, Pyramiden, in 2012. While preparing the subsequent Peter Bjorn and John record he also began a sequence of EPs that reworked tracks from his two Swedish albums with new English vocals; the opening installment, Broken Swenglish, Vol. 1, came out on INGRID in late 2013, and Broken Swenglish, Vol. 2 followed in late 2014 after hard-drive problems erased portions of the string arrangements.