SUMMERSETS ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM, PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW, OUT AUGUST 28, 2026
WATCH / SHARE “CANADA” HERE
BUY / STREAM “CANADA” HERE
MORE TOUR DATES ADDED FOR FALL BEGINNING IN OCTOBER
PRE-SAVE PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PRE-ORDER PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
Photo Credit : Cayllan Cassavia // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Today, summersets, the duo of Kalle Mattson and his childhood friend and long-time bandmate Andrew Sowka, announce their upcoming album, Pine Trees in a Perfect Row, out August 28, 2026. The album was written “to be a (complicated) love letter to Northern Ontario and small town Canadian identity and experience,” explains Mattson. “It's a collection of songs about real Canadian stories, and a character study of a landscape and place that is rarely written about in popular music.”
Each song on Pine Trees in a Perfect Row is based on versions of real people and stories, a collage of characters from my life from Northern Ontario, serving as a sonic autoethnography intersecting memory, class, and place. “While the album is rooted in the idea of the Canadian small town, it’s not just a 'Canada' record; it's a look at Canadian identity on a personal and specific scale, with the intention of speaking to a (hopefully) universal sentiment: that you never really leave your home,” says Mattson.
Today, summersets is aptly sharing the album’s lead track, titled “Canada”. “Portrayals of small town Canada within popular songs are few and far between, and even fewer examples exist depicting Northern Ontario,” says Mattson. “With ‘Canada’ I was trying to write a song that laid out a lot of the themes and stories we explore on the album. It's a conflicted look at Northern Ontario and Canadian identity and as a whole, with each verse looking at a season, starting in summer and ending in spring.”
WATCH / SHARE “CANADA” HERE
BUY / STREAM “CANADA” HERE
MORE ABOUT PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW
By Michael Barclay
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.
WATCH / SHARE “MOVE BACK HOME” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MOVE BACK HOME” HERE
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. 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 Brother 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.
WATCH / SHARE “MILLION DOLLAR TICKET” HERE
BUY / STREAM “MILLION DOLLAR TICKET” HERE
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 Sliding Away”, a song he’s taught in class as a songwriting professor at a Canadian university.
“Secondhand Skates” tells the story of a childhood friend and hockey teammate who was killed by an allegedly drunk driver at 19, while walking his girlfriend home the night before Canada won Olympic gold in 2010. “All the details in that song are true,” says Mattson. “The driver didn’t brake. There was a cross on the side of the road made out of hockey sticks, and that image always stuck with me. It was really hard to write and not make it feel too on the nose. It was the last song I wrote for the record.”
WATCH / SHARE “IF YOU WERE A STRANGER” HERE
BUY / STREAM “IF YOU WERE A STRANGER” HERE
The sweet sounds of summersets often mask melancholy and darkness, but there’s one song on Pine Trees that Mattson considers to be “the only true love song I’ve ever written.” ‘If you were a stranger / I would fall in love again / If you were the start / I would stay right until the end.” He explains, “My partner and I grew up together, and have been together most of our adult lives. We have complicated family situations: we both lost our mothers young, don’t have a lot of family — we’re all we got. I wanted to write something that felt like us.”
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.”
PRE-SAVE PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PRE-ORDER PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW HERE
PERFORMANCE DATES
Jun 18 - Sudbury, ON - Sudbury Theatre Centre
Jul 12 - Ottawa, ON - Bluesfest w/ The Lumineers and Leif Vollebekk
Oct 10 - Ottawa, ON - TBA
Oct 23 - Toronto, ON - Burdock Music Hall
Oct 24 - Sault Ste. Marie, ON - The Loft
PINE TREES IN A PERFECT ROW TRACKLIST
01 Canada
02 Move Back Home
03 Forgetting For The Better
04 If You Were A Stranger
05 Another Year For Free
06 Second Hand Skates
07 Love Like You
08 Million Dollar Ticket
09 Words Worth Writing
10 Somewhere Gone
11 Pine Trees In A Perfect Row