Demand-side management is becoming increasingly pivotal in modern power systems. This paper introduces a highly practical distributed control strategy for managing clusters of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs). The approach is designed to enhance the participation of TCL clusters in demand-side management, ensuring efficient and reliable power system operations. The proposed control strategy defines a priority list, where TCLs can locally reconstruct the global priority list through distributed information exchange. Based on this list, TCLs make local decisions regarding their operational states. Furthermore, the strategy employs an asynchronous communication protocol, which significantly reduces the cost of establishing communication networks compared to control strategies based on synchronous communication. Numerical simulations confirm that, under the asynchronous communication mechanism, the proposed strategy effectively achieves precise tracking of the cluster’s aggregated power relative to the reference power, while also minimizing occurrences of temperature exceedance.