Review
Genre and Mood
ACRAZE built Do It To It for one job: to make a crowd move. It is tech house, a style that keeps the steady kick of house and the lean, percussive drive of techno, and it carries a voice many listeners already knew. The mood is energetic and celebratory, with a nostalgic edge that comes from the sample rather than from anything retro in the production.
Song Summary
The voice belongs to Cherish, the Atlanta sister group whose “Do It to It” was the lead single of their 2006 debut album Unappreciated and reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. That original was a slow R&B song featuring Sean P of the YoungBloodZ. ACRAZE, the Orlando DJ and producer Charlie Duncker, lifted the vocal and set it over a club beat, and the release credits it as “ACRAZE featuring Cherish”. The lyric is an invitation to the dancefloor; in the new setting it becomes a command.
Musical Breakdown
Intro: Establishing the Beat
The track opens on its rhythm, in the tech house manner, with room left for the voice to come.
Verse 1: Cherish Takes Center Stage
When the sampled vocal arrives it sounds like what it is, an R&B performance from another decade lifted into a faster, harder frame. The contrast between the smooth group vocal and the dry, driving beat is the whole idea of the track.
Chorus: The Anthemic Hook
The title phrase is short enough to repeat endlessly and simple enough to shout back. ACRAZE treats it as a rhythmic figure, which is why it works as well in a two-hour DJ set as in a fifteen-second clip.
Bridge: Electronic Breakdown
Between vocal passages the production carries the track on its own, the groove doing the work while the listener waits for the phrase to return.
Verse 2 and Outro: Keeping the Energy Alive
The original mix runs about two and a half minutes, far shorter than the long club tracks of earlier house eras. It ends almost as soon as it has made its point, which makes it easy to replay and easy for DJs to drop into a set.
Concepts in Focus
Do It To It is a textbook case of sampling: the identity of the track lives in a recording made fifteen years earlier for a different genre. Cherish did not re-record anything for it; Thrive Music helped clear the sample and released the track, and the old record became the new one’s calling card.
The second lesson is the four-on-the-floor pulse. Cherish’s original moved at a slow R&B tempo; here the same voice sits on a house kick drum that lands on every beat of the bar. Listen to how that steady pulse turns a seductive vocal into something brisk and physical.
Finally, the hook. A tech house track has little melody to remember, so the memorable part has to be a phrase. “Do it to it” is three syllables of rhythm, and ACRAZE builds the track around repeating it.
Artistic Context
ACRAZE first drew attention when DJ Snake and Malaa played one of his unreleased tracks, and Do It To It followed the same route: it circulated as an unreleased ID through the summer of 2021, supported by DJs such as Chris Lake, DJ Snake, Malaa, John Summit and JOYRYDE, before Thrive Music released it on 20 August 2021. DJ Snake brought ACRAZE on stage to play it at the Brooklyn Mirage. A stream of remixes followed, by Tiësto, Subtronics, Andrew Rayel and Sub Focus among others, and Zedd made a mashup with the Squid Game soundtrack that he played at EDC 2021.
Impact and Reception
In the United States the track reached number three on the Billboard Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart. In the UK it climbed slowly: it entered the top 40 in November 2021 at number 36 and reached number nine in January 2022, in its tenth week on the chart, while also reaching the Irish top three. It is one of the clearest examples of a sample-based club track crossing into the pop charts in the streaming era.
Music Video
The official video arrived months after the song had become a hit, in early 2022. After its release the single, which had slipped to number 68, re-entered the UK top 40, a reminder that a video can still give a song a second life long after its first one.
