"Let's Groove" was written by Maurice White and Wayne Vaughn, and White also produced it. Earth, Wind & Fire released it in September 1981 on Columbia as the first single from their eleventh studio album, Raise!, with a 5:39 album version and a 4:02 single edit at 126 bpm. Blending post-disco, pop and funk, it pairs synthesizers and keyboards with live electric guitars, and the band revived the disco sound during a backlash against the genre. It opens on a robotic vocoder riff with Brecker Brothers horn blasts.
Rolling Stone's Ken Tucker called it "city music", and Jordan Bartel of The Baltimore Sun called it "quite possibly the funkiest thing to come out of the early 1980s". It peaked at number 3 in the US, the band's seventh and last top-10 hit, and spent eight weeks at number one on Billboard Hot Soul Singles in late 1981 and early 1982. It sold over a million copies in the US, earned RIAA gold certification and reached platinum in the UK. NME ranked it 16th in its 1981 Singles of the Year, and it received a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group. Ron Hays directed its video, made with the Scanimate system, which was the first video on BET's Video Soul; the song later influenced Bruno Mars's "Treasure".
