A Quick Note About This Year's Selection

We're still putting the finishing touches to this year's overview, but we couldn't wait to share some standout tracks that are strong contenders for the final list.

What you'll find here is our working shortlist - songs we've chosen not just because they were popular, but because they truly captured something special about 1955. Some made history, others broke new artistic ground, and a few just perfectly bottled the mood of the times.

Think we've missed an important one? We'd genuinely love to hear from you - just tap the contact button up top to share your suggestions. After all, the best musical conversations are the ones we have together.

April 1955: The Farewell at the Crossroads

On 18 April, Albert Einstein drew his last breath in Princeton.
A month later, on 14 May, the Soviet Union sealed a treaty in Warsaw formalising its military alliance. The chosen city spoke for itself: Warsaw, wounded and rebuilt, stood as the emblem of an Eastern Europe no longer liberated but aligned. From there, Moscow consolidated its sphere of influence as if meticulously marking out, square by square, the precise half of a chessboard that could no longer be dismantled.

The Geometry of Fear

Why did six years pass between NATO’s founding in 1949 and its Soviet counterpart?
If we may offer a chessboard analogy: after the Atlantic opening in 1949—with a swift deployment of pieces on central squares—the Eastern player chose not to rush. There was no immediate check to address, yet the position remained tense. For six moves (years), the USSR observed the rival structure’s development with care, reinforcing its own pieces, assessing defensive routes, and calculating its margin for manoeuvre.

However, when Greece and Turkey joined in 1952—fortifying the alliance’s southern flank—and then, in May 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany—a major piece that had until recently been off the board—was admitted, the positional calculus shifted entirely. The mounting pressure demanded a response. It was then that Moscow executed its own castling: summoning its allies to Warsaw and formally establishing the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance.

The Warsaw Pact was no mere imitation: it was the consolidation of a symmetrical structure on the opposite side of the board. Two opposing alliances, two irreconcilable doctrines, and a balance maintained not by a will for peace, but by the dread that a single misstep could end the game. The geometry of fear now had a name, borders, and a logic as cold as it was inexorable.

The Posthumous Manifesto: A Cry from the Brink

From his last sanctuary, Einstein observed the looming tempest with tired clarity—the harsh irony of a time racing toward destruction. Days before he died, his name would appear on the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, Bertrand Russell's powerful ethical plea that transcended ideologies and boundaries.

Both Russell and Einstein had seen too much to remain silent. They grasped that science, unmoored from ethics, could bend to destruction’s will—that nuclear arms, by their very existence, imperilled humanity’s survival. It was not enough to condemn their power: it called on scientists to take responsibility for their knowledge, to abandon the comfort of neutrality, and to take a stand — not for one side, but for life itself.

“Remember your humanity, and forget the rest,” read its central line. It was no rhetorical flourish, but an urgent entreaty from the edge of the abyss.

An Iron Epilogue

Einstein died without witnessing the formalisation of the order he so feared. His passing coincided, with almost symbolic precision, with the birth of a hellish clockwork: the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the perfect mechanism of a peace upheld by terror, a truce sealed with warheads.

That Jewish boy who had fled Prussian militarism expired just as the world became trapped between two mirrored machines—distinct in rhetoric yet identical in their logic of deterrence. The planet, now a divided chessboard, lay under the shadow of two kings with no intent to deliver checkmate, yet armed with enough pieces to annihilate the board entire.

In that macabre equilibrium—where every move was calculated not for boldness but for its capacity to avert catastrophe—the Russell-Einstein manifesto endures as a warning beyond the board: a reminder that some games cannot be won, and others, if played, leave no one standing.

The final public act of a scientist turned conscience, that manifesto sought neither comfort nor reconciliation. It sought to awaken.
And still today, in this world that continues moving pieces without fully grasping the ashes of that April, the words attributed to Nimzowitsch resonate with bitter clarity: “the threat is stronger than the execution.”
For on the nuclear chessboard, there was no need to light the cigar: its mere presence on the table, untouched, dictated every move.
And the manifesto, uncomfortable, unyielding, still pulses like a moral echo no one has managed to silence.

Essential Melodies, Curated by JGC