“Is Love Enough” - TANOKI Feat. Farah Elle

Feature

21 Aug

“Is Love Enough” is less a track you listen to and more one you get pulled into — hypnotic, strange, and strangely comforting. The collaboration between TANOKI and Farah Elle feels like it wasn’t forced into existence, but rather stumbled into being, like two rivers finally crossing paths.

The origin story alone is pretty magical: Farah scribbles a poem about solitude and boundaries, sits down at the piano, lets her voice spill out, and suddenly TANOKI has raw gold in his hands. What he does next isn’t just production — it’s alchemy. Warped guitars bend in and out like whispers, synths swirl in psychedelic spirals, and orchestral textures creep in like shadows at the edge of the frame. Farah’s vocals are haunting, soulful, and untethered — they float just enough to make you feel like you’re teetering on some emotional cliff.

The question at the heart of it — is love enough? — doesn’t get a neat answer, and honestly, that’s the whole point. The song hangs in that liminal space, where connection and selfhood wrestle with each other. It’s intimate, but not in a soft-focus, rom-com way. More like the kind of intimacy that stings because it’s real.

Then there’s the video, directed by Paul Mahon. It doubles down on that feeling — a lush, cinematic piece that plays with contrast. You’ve got Farah singing under rich, saturated lighting, drenched in colour like some dream sequence, and then there are candid, grounded moments with Zelda, where love and connection feel less abstract and more human. It’s not just a performance video; it’s a reflection, a visual diary almost, where the lines between art and life blur.

As for TANOKI, he’s already been building his own sonic universe with his debut File New, but this track shows how much he thrives in collaboration. His sound — part electronic experimentation, part trip-hop haze, part cinematic jazz freak-out — has a way of bending time. And Farah Elle? She’s nothing short of magnetic. There’s a lineage to her music — Libyan roots tangled with Irish soil — and you can hear the history in her phrasing, the way she stitches defiance, vulnerability, and ancestral weight into something new.

Together, they don’t give us an answer, but they give us something better: a song that lingers, a question that refuses to resolve. Is love enough? Maybe. Maybe not. But for four minutes and change, it feels like it might be.

“Is Love Enough” is available now on all major streaming platforms