Indo-Canadian Rocker ASTRA Reclaims Her Power From Abuse on Fearless Single “IDGAF”
ASTRA writes from the uncomfortable spaces most songwriters avoid, the ones where softness and rage occupy the same breath. The Indo-Canadian singer-songwriter, born and raised in Ajax, Ontario and now based in Barrie, confronts that tension head-on with “IDGAF,” out now, the single that refuses to let an abusive relationship have the last word.
ASTRA wrote “IDGAF” roughly a month after ending a four-year relationship, with the anger still immediate and entirely unapologetic. “I wasn’t interested in writing a traditional breakup song about sadness, longing or closure because there was no longing or sadness,” she explains. “Just pure indignance.” Rather than asking for sympathy, the song claims ground. It captures the exact moment attachment gets replaced by defiance, when someone who once held enormous influence over your life suddenly does not anymore, and turns that moment into a declaration.
The lyrics sharpen that emotional pivot by exposing the kind of manipulation and revisionism that often follows abusive relationships. ASTRA opens with biting sarcasm, inviting her former partner to rewrite history: “Tell them that you never spoke to me out of name… tell them… yes, how you always made me feel safe.” But the song’s emotional centre arrives in its defiant chorus: “Cross my heart / Let me drown / Tell them whatever you want now / I don’t give a fuck, cry about how I let you down.” Rather than defending herself, she refuses to participate in the narrative anymore, turning silence into strength and reclaiming the final word.
Produced by Kayla Diamond, the track pushes into ASTRA’s most aggressive territory yet, pairing post-grunge grit with dark, heavy production that refuses to soften on anyone’s behalf. There is no tidy resolution here, no attempt to make the anger more presentable. That is the point. ASTRA lets the resentment and release behind the song stay raw and unresolved, giving voice to a feeling a lot of people are told to swallow instead.
That refusal to shrink runs through ASTRA’s entire artistic identity. Her voice has been described as vulnerable yet fiercely commanding, smoky and intimate one moment, edged with ferocity the next, cutting through melodies built on tension and unrest. Her guiding mantra, “our rage is a legacy of broken bones,” speaks to the cyclical nature of abuse and the ways violence against women has become normalized, minimized and carried across generations. While rooted in ASTRA’s own cultural experience, that inherited rage extends beyond it, speaking to women who recognize the consequences of what generations before them were expected to endure, and do so with grace. The thought is completed in her upcoming single “Sanskar”: “Our rage is a legacy of broken bones / from the stones they still throw at me.”
“IDGAF” follows ASTRA’s earlier track “The Twenty Eighth Day” and serves as the lead single from her forthcoming album, ‘Kitty Envy.’ Both songs draw from lived experience and generational memory, and together they establish ASTRA as an artist willing to say what others are still working up the courage to say out loud. Her music exists in the space between power and vulnerability, and she is using that space to hand her audience permission to take their own power back.
With “IDGAF,” ASTRA does not ask to be believed. She insists on it, and in doing so, gives a voice to anyone who has ever needed one.
ASTRA’s fearless new single “IDGAF,” from her forthcoming album ‘Kitty Envy,’ turns the end of an abusive relationship into an unapologetic declaration of power.
Hi, Astra! Good to meet you! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
Thank you so much for chatting with me. My name is Āstra Jain, and I’m an Indo-Canadian poet and singer-songwriter.
You wrote “IDGAF” about a month after ending the relationship, with the anger still completely raw. What was it like putting that feeling into a song so soon, before you’d had time to process it in any other way?
So good. And so incredibly cathartic. “So soon” is funny to me because externally, yes, it probably looked very fast. Some people were concerned that I had skipped mourning altogether and buried a lot of unprocessed emotions because of how quickly I moved on.
But the truth is, I hadn’t been fully transparent about how toxic that relationship had become. People sensed something was wrong, but even now, as my friends and family watch my storytimes on social media, I still get messages saying things like, “I wish I knew” or “I didn’t know it was that bad.” I didn’t tell anyone the deeper details of what was happening because I was ashamed.
By the time the relationship officially ended, I had already been coming to terms with where it was headed for months. It had taken me a long time to emotionally peel myself away. Maybe if it had ended respectfully, he would have maintained some dignified rapport with me but honestly, with enough distance, I still think the anger would have surfaced. So it needed somewhere to go.
The final break happened after a very public fight at a restaurant, and something in me just snapped into clarity. And I remember him even saying, “you’re so angry” and I shouted “well YEAH!” and while it was probably inappropriate, that was the first time I finally put bass and raised the decibels in my voice for him to hear it and truly understand what consequences sound like when you push someone to the point of no return. So after that, it made cutting him off permanently so much easier because I finally stopped reasoning with him and hypotheticals.
Four years later, I still have no regrets. It makes me smile, if anything.
You’ve said you weren’t interested in writing a traditional breakup song about sadness or longing, just pure indignance. Was that a conscious choice from the first line, or did the song start somewhere softer and get sharper as you wrote it?
Absolutely. The softness, if there is any, is in the confession of how imbalanced the relationship had become.
There’s a point in the song where I’m basically relinquishing control of the narrative, and that comes directly from a real conversation. He had created an alternate version of events with his parents, and I remember finally saying, “You know what? You’re right. I’m f***ing tired. Tell them whatever. I just want to be done” and didn’t say a thing for years.
My last act of kindness to him was willing to be the villain in his story with the condition being, if it meant I could leave his life forever — no contact. I had spent so much of the relationship taking responsibility for harm I didn’t create, so at first the song carried some of that same surrender.
Then it became, “Actually, f*** you. And f*** kindness.”So the song sharpened into something much more confrontational. I’ll sing. His circle can do the math. What comes after that isn’t really my business. He created the circumstances so eventually, the repercussions will catch up.
You worked with producer Kayla Diamond on this, and it’s described as your most aggressive territory yet. What did that collaboration look like, was there a conversation about how far to push the production, or did it come together naturally?
Kayla is incredible. She is insanely creative and just gets it. Also, she works FAST. So, a lot of this EP came together naturally once I learned to get out of her way and let her play. With “IDGAF,” it was very much, “Kayla, please take the wheel.”
I will say, that can also be difficult when you’re emotionally attached to the original writing, and I definitely made it harder at times but she understood the energy immediately. I told her, “It needs to sound like scorched earth” and came back with a demo that floored me.
It was scorched earth with torrential downpour.
What makes her work on this song even more meaningful is that “IDGAF” was originally a song I had grown to hate.
A year earlier, it existed as a four-piece rock arrangement with my old band, and we all struggled with it. I had essentially written it on a four-chord loop and then lifted the chorus by a couple keys, so after the first chorus it started to feel monotonous. We kept trying to make it work without turning it into a copy of our other, more climactic songs.
We almost scrapped it but I refused. Mostly because the subject matter felt too universal to throw away and I knew there was something worth saving.
Kayla came in after the band disbanded, (on great terms) and understood the issue almost immediately. She basically said, “I see why you guys struggled. You don’t know where the verse ends and the chorus begins. I’m going to change some of the notes, and you’re going to write me a new chorus.”
But then I was stuck. At that point, I was so deeply in my head that I couldn’t access the emotion anymore. My husband finally told me I needed to get back to how I felt when it happened. It’s messed up to admit, but sometimes when you’re happy, the writing suffers if your inspiration usually comes from feeling things very deeply. Some artists can open that door by twisting a knob. I had installed about twelve locks.
So my husband poured his best whiskey and said, “We’re getting drunk and talking sh*t about your ex.”
And we did. It wasn’t dramatic. No tears. It was actually extremely fun and cathartic. But yeah, I got mad again. Fortunately, anger is an emotion I love to alchemize, and once I found it again, the words came easily.
The original chorus went from:
“Tell them whatever/IDGAF anymore/Tell them whatever/So long as you let me go.” Which is… fine.
Then I got back into that creative energy and wrote:
“Cross my heart let me drown
Tell them whatever you want now.
IDGAF. Cry about how I let you down.”
Yes. That is beautifully c*nty. And that was it.That was the song..
You’ve said this song hands your audience permission to take their own power back. Have you heard from anyone yet who’s told you what “IDGAF” meant to them, and did that response change how you think about the song?
Honestly, I haven’t had that one message yet where someone has explicitly told me, “this song helped me take my power back,” and I think part of that is because we’re still very early in the life of the song. I’ve only been actively promoting it for about two weeks, while my audience itself is still growing.
What I have noticed is that people respond very strongly to the anger in it, to the aura around the music, and to the larger mission of “Retrieve The Matriarch” — especially when I talk about the experiences behind the song. There’s a deep and painfully common understanding there, particularly among women. They understand that raw, resolute point where you finally throw your hands up and say, “we’re done here.”
The most profound response I’ve seen so far has actually come through the stories I’ve been sharing about my mother’s abuse and my own. One of those conversations has taken on a life of its own, and the comments are full of women telling their own “flee stories” — women who left homes, money, belongings, marriages, entire lives behind because freedom and safety mattered more. Watching them find one another in that comment section has probably been the clearest expression of my “why” so far: community.
So the short answer is no, it hasn’t changed how I think about the song so much as reinforced why I wrote it. When one woman hears another woman’s story and suddenly recognizes her own, the meaning echoes outward. That is more than I could have ever asked for.