The 2020s File Feature
How It's Done
How It's Done: HUNTR/X Stakes a Top-Ten Claim on the Hot 100 The Second Shot, Even More Precise When a new act places two songs on the Billboard Hot 100 in t…
01 The Story
How It's Done: HUNTR/X Stakes a Top-Ten Claim on the Hot 100
The Second Shot, Even More Precise
When a new act places two songs on the Billboard Hot 100 in the same chart week, the second song's performance often tells you something the first one cannot: whether the audience came for a single track or for the act itself. In the case of HUNTR/X, the answer was unmistakably the latter. While "Takedown" was climbing toward its eventual peak of 21, "How It's Done" was moving even faster and going even higher, the kind of double strike that signals an act with genuine momentum behind it rather than a fortunate launch.
"How It's Done" debuted on July 12, 2025, at number 42 and spent 10 weeks on the Hot 100, reaching its peak of number 9 on September 6. That top-ten finish puts it in a different category entirely from its companion single: this is not a breakout story, it is a statement of sustained arrival.
The Sound That Earned the Position
Where "Takedown" traded on controlled aggression and the thrill of collective arrival, "How It's Done" sounds more assured, more at ease in its own skin. The production has a confidence that comes from knowing you have already landed; it does not need to announce itself because it simply is. EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and REI AMI each bring their most natural register to the track, and the result is a song that feels simultaneously like a demonstration and a declaration.
The title is instructive. "How It's Done" implies mastery being demonstrated, a tutorial delivered from a position of competence. Everything about the song's sonic construction makes that argument: the transitions between verses are smooth, the hook lands with precision, and the three voices achieve a coherence that sounds earned rather than engineered.
From Debut to Top Ten: the Climb
The chart trajectory of "How It's Done" is one of the cleaner narratives in the Hot 100 data for summer 2025: debut at 42, up to 29 the following week, then 23, then 19, then holding at 19, before the eventual push to 9. Each week's movement reflects growing playlist adds, word-of-mouth listening, and the kind of organic accumulation that labels spend years trying to manufacture. For a new collective without the infrastructure of a legacy act behind them, this trajectory is genuinely impressive.
The peak of 9 makes "How It's Done" the HUNTR/X project's highest-charting single on the American Hot 100. For three artists who came up independently, that number carries real weight.
What the Dual-Single Strategy Achieved
Running two singles simultaneously on the same chart is a risk. Audiences might cannibalize one song's streams to favor the other; casual listeners might not investigate far enough to find the second track. HUNTR/X managed neither pitfall, which suggests that their audience was engaged enough to seek out both songs and committed enough to stream both consistently over multiple weeks.
The combined chart presence of "Takedown" and "How It's Done" announced HUNTR/X as an act with a body of work worth exploring, not just a song worth catching once on a playlist. Over 217 million YouTube views on the project's associated content underline the scale of the audience they had assembled.
The Legacy of a Summer Statement
In the broader story of 2020s pop, HUNTR/X's summer 2025 chart run will likely be remembered as one of the cleaner examples of a new kind of pop act making its case on streaming-era terms: no legacy, no massive label campaign, just music that people found and chose to keep playing.
What "How It's Done" ultimately demonstrates is that breaking through in 2025 requires more than a great song; it requires a great song that arrives with enough context and community to keep people listening past the first week. HUNTR/X built that context through three individual careers of consistent creative work, and the song is the culmination of all of it. The number 9 is not where the story ends; it is where the story becomes obvious to anyone who was not already paying attention.
Hit play and hear a collective that knows exactly where they are going.
“How It's Done” — HUNTR/X: EJAE, Audrey Nuna & REI AMI's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
How It's Done: Mastery, Process, and the Grammar of Success
The Tutorial as Power Move
The title "How It's Done" adopts the rhetoric of demonstration: not "what we want" or "what we feel" but the specific claim that we possess knowledge worth transmitting. This is a subtle but meaningful choice for a song from a new collective. Rather than positioning EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and REI AMI as aspirants, it positions them as practitioners showing their work. The song's entire emotional grammar flows from that premise.
In a genre landscape where credibility is often performed through display (of wealth, of social connections, of industry validation), claiming mastery by demonstration rather than declaration is its own kind of statement. The song earns its confidence through the quality of its execution.
Process as Identity
Contemporary hip-hop and pop hybrid music has increasingly made the creative process itself into content: the documentation of work, the evidence of craft, the visible labor behind the seamless-seeming product. "How It's Done" participates in this tradition, presenting the art of making music as its own argument for the artists' legitimacy.
For three artists whose journeys to this chart moment involved years of independent work, the process is not an abstract concept. It is their actual history: the sessions, the releases, the gradual accumulation of a following that brought them to the point where a debut at 42 on the Hot 100 was possible. The song channels that accumulated experience into a present-tense performance of confidence.
Three Voices, One Lesson
The collective structure of HUNTR/X means that "how it's done" is never the pronouncement of a single authority but a shared knowledge that three distinct voices hold and demonstrate together. This multiplicity enriches the theme: mastery is not the possession of one person but something that can be built collectively, through collaboration between artists whose individual strengths complement rather than duplicate each other.
EJAE's production instincts, Audrey Nuna's textural vocal intelligence, and REI AMI's rhythmic precision are each doing specific work in the song's architecture. The lesson being taught is partly about those individual skills and partly about what happens when they are combined.
Confidence Without Arrogance
The emotional balance the song manages is worth noting. Songs that claim mastery can easily tip into condescension or self-congratulation; "How It's Done" avoids both. The tone is assured without being smug, instructive without being condescending. This is partly a function of the delivery: all three artists perform with a lightness that keeps the claims from feeling heavy with self-importance.
For listeners navigating their own ambitions and processes, this tonal balance is part of what makes the song approachable. It invites identification rather than demanding admiration, and the distinction matters more than it might initially seem.
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