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. 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.)

Pine Trees in a Perfect Row is rich with the kind 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.

As a solo artist in the 2010s, Mattson won or was nominated for every major prize in Canada. 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. Pine Trees is a stripped-down acoustic record that sounds like what it is: recorded live off the floor with keyboardist/producer Jim Bryson (Kathleen Edwards, Weakerthans) and Peter Von Althen (Skydiggers) on drums. Only additional guitarist Christine Bougie (Bahamas) and a string section were overdubbed later. That immediacy and intimacy comes through in every note. 

Says Mattson, proudly, “It feels really like I’ve finally made the record I’ve wanted to make for a long time.”