Tove Lo’s “Talking Body” Came Back Through a TikTok Producer, Then Lil Mabu Started Freestyling Over It

A decade-old Tove Lo hit is trending again because of a stranger’s trap remix, and Lil Mabu has spent weeks freestyle over the wave without a finish song of it.

Tove Lo‘s “Talking Body” is over a decade old, a 2015 single off her debut album Queen of the Clouds that followed “Habits (Stay High)” as her second top-20 hit and peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. It found a second life this summer for reasons that had nothing to do with the singer herself. On July 17, TikTok user @kjtheproducer4 posted a trap remix of the song captioned “I’ll remix anything.” The clip took off fast, passing 7.4 million views within a month, and the remixed sound, officially rel as “Bodiez,” spread across more than 201,000 TikTok posts. Tove Lo’s own original “Talking Body” sound pick up the wave too, climbing past 1.9 million uses on the app.

Tove Lo noticed. She commented directly on KJ’s remix, telling him he’d turned her song into a different one entirely, an approval that only fed the trend. A dance challenge followed: on July 30, TikTok user @realz4y built a choreography routine around the remix, and an August 8 posting of it has since passed 5.8 million views and 700,000 likes. Billboard’s Kyle Denis covered the resurgence in a Chart Beat roundup, noting that despite the viral numbers, Luminate’s official on-demand streaming data for “Bodiez” in the U.S. remained comparatively small, a reminder that a sound’s TikTok footprint and its formal chart footprint don’t always move together.

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Lil Mabu, the Manhattan-born Brooklyn drill rapper behind “Mathematical Disrespect” and “No Snitching,” is a separate thread in the same trend rather than the source of it. Born Matthew Peter DeLuca in 2005, he’s built a career on exactly this kind of loud, online-native moment since breaking out with “Mathematical Disrespect” in 2023, a song that climbed to number 47 on the Hot 100 largely on the strength of TikTok. His own verified TikTok account posted a “new studio” clip captioned with the trend’s tags that alone pulled in over 460,000 likes, and it’s been follow version tagged as a “Kelo Remix” and a separate feature on a “talking body (flight)” remix released under producer CloudWrld’s name, distinct from both KJ the Producer’s “Bodiez” and Mabu’s own freestyle clips.

@lilmabu #talkingbody #freestyle #lilmabu ♬ original sound – Ocho

What hasn’t surfaced, at least not yet, is one finished, officially released Lil Mabu single called “Talking Body.” What’s circulating instead is a rolling series of clips, some posted from his main account and others from fan-run lyric pages, capturing freestyles and edits rather than a mastered, distributed track. It’s a familiar shape for a drill artist riding a trend in real time: bars over a hot sound get tested in public, gauged by comments and reposts, before, or sometimes instead of, an actual rel.

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Either Mabu’s version of “Talking Body” ends up as a proper single or stays a stretch of viral studio clips is, for now, still an open question.