Asthma Kids Release Abbey Road-Mixed “The People United and Strong,” The Punk Rallying Cry To Tax Billionaires
Asthma Kids are angry. They have always been angry. But on their ferocious new single “The People United and Strong,” that anger has been alchemised into something even more dangerous: hope. This is not a soft pivot. This is a band that has looked at billionaires hoarding the planet’s resources, looked at the boot on the neck of the working class, looked at a world on fire, and decided that the most radical thing they can do right now is demand that we stand together. “The union united and strong / the people united and strong / all the genders united and strong / the poor united and strong.” Go ahead and try to get that out of your head.
The song was born in the studio on the day Trevor Hutchinson became a grandfather. His twenty-year-old daughter gave birth while the band were mid-session, and that eruption of new life cracked something open in the writing.
“We had a musical structure and I was working on lyrics that matched the anger of our recent releases,” Hutchinson says. “But that life news got me to frame our message in a positive light that promotes unity.” Make no mistake, the fury is still there and fully intact. “I’m still beyond angry,” he adds. “It’s time for us to tax billionaires out of existence and end the psychopathic distribution of wealth. But that is going to take unity, harmony and love.”
A grandchild entered the world. A punk anthem came out with him.
The lyrics do not flinch. “The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer / Now I know what I’m fighting for” sits alongside “I believe in welfare, but I prefer taxes / Or any other measure that evens out the classes.” This is not protest music that hedges. Asthma Kids, composed of Trevor Hutchinson and JP Gill, have never heard a genre they won’t gleefully subvert, repurpose, and rebuild from the wreckage, and “The People United and Strong” is a punk earworm that refuses to stay inside any lines at all. They are famously genre-agnostic, stating plainly that they leave labels for soup cans. Adjacent to punk, freak folk, country, and power pop, they are ultimately something else altogether: seemingly nice neighbours living next door to musical convention, until they burn down every house on the street.
The production matches the ambition. Hutchinson produced the track himself at Jack Cade Studios in Lindsay, Ontario. Adam Haggart mixed it at the Reverie Recording Studio in Peterborough. Then it went to Abbey Road in London, where mastering engineer Alex Wharton put the finishing edge on it. A punk song about taxing billionaires out of existence, mastered at the most storied studio on the planet. That is exactly the kind of move Asthma Kids make.
The single arrives on the heels of their 2025 EP ‘The Meek Are Getting Ready,’ named one of the best EPs of 2025 by PunkNews.org and distributed via Dammit Distro across the EU and UK, and 2 Bar Town Records across North America. The track has already been added to both WARM and Earshot. A summer tour launches in Toronto in late August and pushes westward from there. Asthma Kids are not waiting for permission to be heard, and they are not asking nicely. The people are united. The people are strong. The song says so.
Hi, Trevor! Good to see you again! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Nice to talk to you again, Jenna. Canadian Beats gives space to independent artists of all genres to discuss their music in a more in-depth way than is the standard. We really appreciate it. And thanks for taking the time to talk about our new single, “The People United and Strong.”
This song turns anger into hope. Was that shift intentional, or did it happen naturally once the lyrics started forming?
So, there is a backstory to the positive, hopeful lyrics. And it’s almost corny, lol. As you know, our recent output has had a lot of overt anger towards late-stage capitalism and the psychopathic billionaire class. Those songs accurately describe—in the short song form that is our version of punk—what we think about the current state of affairs.
I was writing and recording some vocals in our band studio, where we do most of our initial tracking. I was coming out with some really angry lyrics that called for the overthrow of the current class system. Don’t get me wrong. We are not communists (not that there’s anything wrong with that). We just think that what we have is not capitalism or a free market, but rather a system of criminal oligarchy. But I digress, haha.
Anyway, I’d say this really ‘screamy’, angry song was half-written. And then I got word that my oldest daughter, who is 20, had just given birth and that I would get to see my new granddaughter in an hour. Now, we have always said that anger alone will not change a system—or at least won’t change it for the good. But some in-the-moment personal happiness shifted my thoughts to the idea that social unity is the only way we will ultimately make our society more just and equitable. I do worry about the future for my kids, and now grandkids, but in the moment it felt natural to imagine the masses unified.
You call unity the most radical act right now. Why do you think that idea feels more dangerous than anger alone?
Unity requires conversation. Discussion. Rational debate. It’s collective in nature. It demands nuance and perspective. It requires understanding and love. It demands pretty well the exact opposite of where the algorithms take us (by design). The powers that be stay in power because we give them our power. We give them our power, in part, by fighting each other. (Think: blaming an immigrant instead of the system that could allow someone to be a trillionaire). So, wanting unity and the things required to possibly get there are sadly radical at this point in time.
This track is incredibly catchy for something so politically charged. How do you balance message and memorability?
Ah, thank you! We call ourselves genre-atheists. It’s not that we are genre-fluid; we just don’t believe in genres. We believe they can be forces of exclusion. So, we have grown up listening to, playing, and writing music from almost every genre. In fact, at the end of the month we will be in a fancy Toronto studio recording a kids song lol. Now, I love most forms of punk. But when we remember a song sung to us as a child, it probably had some simplicity and melody. Not someone screaming lol. So it’s fun to mess around with those concepts: throw it in the pot and stir it around.
There is a sense of urgency in everything you do. Do you feel like music can still drive real change, or is it about starting conversations?
Sometimes a piece of music can drive real change. Think of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” or Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come.” Songs released to fight against South African apartheid (The Specials’ “Free Nelson Mandela,” Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” etc.) galvanized public opinion in a short amount of time. Our song isn’t one of those. But all art is supposed to confront and to challenge. Even those famous songs didn’t change anything on their own. Things were changed by people getting together and demanding change—perhaps informed by that art. So, I guess I’d say it’s about starting the conversations. But we are going to start our conversation from where we are: imagining all the genders, the meek, the poor, the unions—all the people, united and strong.
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