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 1959. 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.

The Boy Who Ran Into the Nouvelle Vague

May 1959. The 400 Blows ("Les Quatre Cents Coups"), the debut film by François Truffaut, didn’t arrive at Cannes like a traditional premiere — it burst in like a boy escaping reform school: breathless, unauthorised, with the camera trailing behind him at a distance, never breaking the pace. No abrupt cuts, no consoling music: just a flight through empty streets all the way to the sea. And when he finally stops, when he turns and looks straight at us, time fractures. The final frame freezes — and with it, a question left unanswered.

Jean-Pierre Léaud, just fourteen, didn’t audition to be perfect. He was chosen because his eyes held something you couldn’t rehearse: anger, yes, but also that strange light of someone who’s just realised the world is far smaller than promised. Antoine Doinel —his character— doesn’t cry or deliver speeches. He runs. From the school that suffocates him, from the home that shrinks him, from a France still measuring its children with the same tape used to slice the bread.

Europe in 1959 still bore the invisible wreckage of war. The houses stood, but the families wobbled. People spoke of rebuilding, but raised their children in fear. Authority wasn’t debated — it was obeyed, or else. In that landscape of weary adults and inherited rules, Truffaut’s cinema —and especially Les Quatre Cents Coups— wasn’t merely an aesthetic shift. It was an existential cry. Antoine’s struggle wasn’t his alone; it belonged to a whole generation raised amid absence, punished in silence, and told not to ask why.

Truffaut films as if snatching moments in passing: the chill of a boarding house, the smoke from a stolen cigarette, the final sprint towards a sea that offers no comfort.

No melody to ease the impact — just the panting breath of a boy sprinting aimlessly. The camera shakes, but not due to awkwardness: it shakes because, after many years, cinema is vibrant once more.

When Truffaut won Best Director, no one hailed it as a triumph. It was a provocation. Studios frowned. Critics —used to polished dramas— adjusted their spectacles. But in darkened theatres, young people clenched their fists. At last, someone had filmed the truth without dressing it up as art.

The Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) wasn’t born in a manifesto. It was born in that final shot: a boy staring into the lens, frozen and free, as the black and white slowly erases him. It wasn’t an ending. It was the first frame of everything still to come.

COBOL: The Language That Spoke Office

It’s 1959. Computers are towering machines filling entire rooms—temperamental giants, each speaking its own incomprehensible dialect. Against this backdrop, a group of visionaries — including the legendary Grace Hopper — had a radical idea: What if we created a language that any computer could understand… and even an accountant could read?

That’s how COBOL was born—short for Common Business-Oriented Language. It was the first successful attempt to make computers speak like offices. Hopper helped design a language where instructions weren’t hidden behind formulas, but written in clear, readable words—almost like lines from a business memo.

It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t made for geniuses. But it worked. So well, in fact, that six decades later — though no one mentions it at tech conferences — it’s still the quiet backbone of banks, governments, and the systems that keep money moving. A perfect paradox: the language created for accessibility now depends on the few remaining “translators” who still understand it.

It was like teaching a machine to do accounting using plain language. And it worked. Governments, banks, and major companies adopted it to handle payrolls, inventories, transactions. It wasn’t pretty, but it was solid.

What’s curious is that, despite sounding like a digital fossil, COBOL is still alive. Many modern systems — especially in finance — continue to rely on it. Why? Because replacing it is expensive, time-consuming, and dangerously error-prone.

That said, hardly anyone writes new software in COBOL these days. Those who maintain it are like classic car mechanics, experts at keeping the old engines running. The real issue? There are fewer and fewer of them left. And meanwhile, in the backroom of your bank, COBOL keeps quietly doing its job… like that veteran bookkeeper who never quite retired.

When Technology Started Thinking for Itself

In 1959, technology began to let go of the instruction manual. The Agfa Optima, the first 35 mm camera with fully automatic exposure, adjusted aperture and shutter speed on its own. No need for meters, no rules to follow. Photography —that chemical memory of the world— no longer depended on steady hands or technical skill.

That same year, during a lecture on optical pumping, a young physicist named Gordon Gould introduced a concept that sounded like a beam of light itself: LASER, short for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. The device hadn’t yet been built — that would come in 1960 with Theodore Maiman — but the word had already been released into the world: a promise, a premonition.

And farther still, from the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Soviet Union aimed at the Moon. Luna 2 became the first human-made object to reach the surface of the Moon, crashing into it on 14 September 1959. Its predecessor, Luna 1, had missed its target earlier that year — but in doing so, it became the first manmade artefact to enter a heliocentric orbit. Sometimes, even failure opens new paths.

A Farewell That Resounded Through Generations

On 8 April 1959, Montevideo said goodbye to Luis Alberto de Herrera. At 85, the towering figure of Uruguayan nationalism left a legacy that would outlive him — not only in history books, but in a family name destined to return. Three decades later, his grandson Luis Alberto Lacalle would become president. And in 2020, his great-grandson Luis Lacalle Pou would take office too. Few names stretch across centuries and generations. His did.

Essential Melodies, Curated by JGC