“It was made under the weirdest conditions,” David Pajo said during a telephone interview last week about his latest record. He recorded the bulk of the album, “Pajo” (Drag City), alone in a room he was then subletting in Brooklyn. “My roommate was asleep a lot of the time, so I’d have to sing really quietly. On some songs, I sang directly into the microphone on my laptop. That really set the tone for the album.”

The songs that resulted were so private that Pajo wasn’t immediately comfortable performing them onstage. “When I wrote them, they were personal to the point of almost being disgusting,” he said, laughing. “But now I think of them as cover songs. I have enough distance from the motivation behind them that I can enjoy playing them and not think so much about the lyrics.”

The hushed vocals and delicate acoustic guitar work certainly add a quiet mood to his songs, which evoke the melancholy of Leonard Cohen and the wistfulness of Nick Drake. The intimacy is intensified by his lyrics, which grapple with memory, relationships, and the paradox of, as one song puts it, “loveless love.” As Pajo sings in “Icicles,” “‘Tis the season to be vulnerable.”

Pajo’s music career began in the late 1980s in Louisville, Ky., where he helped found the short-lived but hugely influential band Slint. The group’s slow, hypnotic music fathered a genre dubbed “post-rock,” subsequently expanded by bands such as Tortoise, Mogwai, and Explosions in the Sky.

Slint’s legend remains so vibrant that, after 14 years apart, the group played to packed venues during a month long reunion tour last March. “It was like going back to high school again,” Pajo said. “I was surprised how much those songs were ingrained in me, and how much I remembered without listening to them first.”

There are no specific plans to keep Slint’s reunion alive, but Pajo hasn’t ruled it out. “Maybe we’ll just write songs for movies or something,” he said. “We always got jazzed about writing together.”

Collaboration has long been a Pajo specialty. He has spent time playing with the aforementioned Tortoise, as well as with other indie-rock stalwarts such as Palace, Royal Trux, and Stereolab. He even visited the Billboard top 10 as a member of Zwan, Billy Corgan’s (ex-Smashing Pumpkins) infamous supergroup that disbanded after releasing one album in 2002.

Throughout all this activity, Pajo has maintained a prolific solo career. Released under the names M, Aerial M, and Papa M, his 1990s recordings were mostly instrumental. But on 2001’s watershed Papa M album “Whatever, Mortal,” Pajo’s voice rose quickly over a stirring set of tunes. The somber folk of “Roses in the Snow,” intimate acoustics of “Sorrow Reigns,” and sentimental croon of “Many Splendored Thing” all foreshadowed his latest efforts.

Pajo is nearly finished with a new solo album that he plans to release next fall. “It’s a little more polished, but the structures are similar [to the last album],” he said. “It’s self-recorded too, but I’ve been able to do it properly. The last record was done so fast; I felt like I had to get it down as quickly as possible. With this one I’m taking my time.”

Up next is a solo tour of Australia and New Zealand in March, where Pajo will continue a performing technique he first tested last October. “I opened for Cat Power at a show in Louisville, and I played these bells that are foot-operated,” he said. “Each bell is a different note, so I can combine them to make melodies. Before, if I wanted a second melody, I’d play it on harmonica, but playing it with bells sounds way cooler.”

Pajo is also working with a new band, Dead Child, that includes Todd Cook and Michael McMahan from Slint. “It’s kind of improvised metal,” he said of the band’s music. “We have a lead singer named Dahm who writes lyrics based on weird horror movies.”

That group is based in Louisville, but Pajo is now officially a Manhattan resident, having moved to an apartment in the East Village. His homebound creative process seems unaffected by the change in scenery. “It’s weird; now that I live here permanently, I never leave the apartment,” Pajo said, laughing. “I go out to get a cigarette or coffee, but that’s it. I guess I can do this anywhere.”

February 19 at the Knitting Factory (74 Leonard Street, between Broadway and Church Street, 212-219-3132).