Like many of their financially pinched generation, Kalle Mattson and Andrew Sowka of summersets might have to “Move Back Home.” That song, from the harmony-rich Ottawa duo’s second album, Pine Trees in a Perfect Row, is of the timeliest singles of 2026, by acknowledging the affordability crisis in North American cities. As any headline will tell you —but not many songs will — millennials are reckoning with the fact that they’ll be unlikely to afford a home in major urban centres, and are moving back to the small towns they were eager to escape in their youth. (In the case of summersets, that’s the Great Lakes city of Sault Ste.Marie, in northern Ontario.)

“Move Back Home” was the first song Mattson wrote for Pine Trees, and it gave him a theme to centre the rest around. “So many people I went to high school with moved away from Sault Ste.Marie or somewhere else in northern Ontario, and then in order to move ahead in life they had to move back home: retreat to move forward.” There’s an explicit theme of class consciousness and economic realism absent in so much popular music, even though the times clearly call for it: witness the recent revival of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” as a rare example.

But there’s another timely element of home that runs throughout Pine Trees in a Perfect Row, one that speaks to Mattson’s identity as a Canadian songwriter at a time of considerable North American tension. “While the album is rooted in the idea of the Canadian small town, it’s not just a 'Canada' record,” says Mattson. “It’s a look at Canadian identity on a personal and specific scale, with the intention of speaking to a hopefully universal sentiment. 

That said, the first track is simply titled “Canada” Says Mattson, “The chorus was just a placeholder, but every three-syllable word I tried never felt right. So let’s own it! There are so few modern songs about Canada. And not in a waving-the-flag way: I’m as conflicted as anyone about where I’m from and how it’s shaped my life and my writing.” The album’s striking artwork is influenced by the Canadian modernist movement of the 1960s, which culminated with Expo 67. 

As a solo artist in the 2010s, Mattson won or was nominated for every major prize in Canada, for his three consecutive albums 2014’s Someday, The Moon Will Be Gold, 2015’s Avalanche and 2018’s Youth. During pandemic lockdowns in 2020, he formed summersets with Sowka, his childhood friend, to explore Everly Brothers harmonies and to alleviate the weight of being a solo artist. Their acclaimed 2023 debut small town story was a narrative concept album, exploring the lives of one couple whose story ends in tragedy.

This time out, Mattson says he didn’t want to write fiction. On Pine Trees, the stories and characters are very real: one song, “Another Year For Free,” has one verse about high school, one about a divorcée, one about his Italian immigrant grandfather who worked at a steel plant, and one about his mother’s cancer. He admits the vignette structure is based in part on Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away,” a song he’s taught in class as a songwriting professor at a Canadian university.