What We Lost II by Hanan Townshend: Review

by admin March 20, 2026

March 20, 2026

What We Lost II by Hanan Townshend: Review

Hanan Townshend’s “What We Lost II” encounters something you cannot quite name. Townshend, known for shaping music around other people’s stories in film, turns inward here. This piece comes from a larger body of work wrestling with grief as a foggy, shifting state that arrives before language does. That uncertainty hangs over the music in a powerful way. Townshend sits beside the loss, listens to it, and lets it breathe. Recorded at home on his child’s upright piano, with the sounds of birds and the outside world allowed to drift into the room, the piece bears rusticity.

That setting matters, because “What We Lost II” is full of small, fragile details that make it feel experienced. You can sense the philosophy behind it, that grief is not sterile, it is interrupted, tangled up with memory, with daily life, with nature continuing outside the window, whether you are ready for it or not. The track seems to understand that loss does not arrive alone. It comes with echoes, distortions, tenderness, and sometimes, oddly enough, signs of life.

Musically, the piece opens with writhing violin, slowly trailing trembling notes as if it is holding its breath. Underneath, the piano moves at a measured pace, sparse at first, almost hesitant. Then, after about a minute, the keys begin to unfold more fully, taking on a gentler, more graceful flow. It is a beautiful shift, subtle but deeply felt. The piano does not suddenly offer comfort, exactly, but it creates space. Meanwhile, the strings begin to pulse and writhe more sharply, like a heart straining toward something it can no longer reach. That tension between the breathing piano and the aching strings gives the track its emotional shape.

What makes “What We Lost II” so affecting is that it never tries to tidy up the mess of feeling. It holds sorrow and hope in the same trembling hand. There is beauty here, but it is delicate. There is light, but it flickers. Townshend has created a piece that listens as much as it speaks, and in doing so, he captures how grief simply becomes part of how we hear the world.