1. Coldplay - A Rush of Blood to the Head
2. Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink..
3. Badly Drawn Boy - Have You Fed...
4. Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
5. Beck - Sea Change
6. The Vines - Highly Evolved
7. Doves - The Last Broadcast
8. Tom Waits - Alice/Blood Money
9. Red Hot Chili Peppers - By the Way
10. Eminem - The Eminem Show
11. David Bowie - Heathen
12. Bruce Springsteen - The Rising
13. The Soundtrack of Our Lives - Behind
14. Audioslave - Audioslave
15. Beth Orton - Daybreaker
16. Gomez - In Our Gun
17. Ryan Adams - Demolition
17. Jurassic 5 - Power in Numbers
19. Norah Jones - Come Away With Me
20. Elvis Costello - When I Was Cruel
21. Oasis - Heathen Chemistry
22. Peter Gabriel - Up
23. Ash - Free All Angels
24. Haven - Between the Senses
25. Sam Payne - Railroad Blessing

It's been an extraordinary year for music. So good in fact, it was tremendously hard to narrow my list down to 25 artists. As a result, I had to cut fantastic efforts from Sonic Youth, Pulp, Starsailor, Eels and Simple Minds from my final list. This is to say nothing of the numerous other worthy efforts released during the course of 2002. At any rate, this is what I came up with. While the new effort from Coldplay doesn't have an entirely original sound, that hardly matters, for this album is such a pure joy to listen to, that I had to pick it as number one. Many have compared Rush of Blood to the Head to the works of Echo and the Bunnymen, but heart-felt numbers like "God Put a Smile on Your Face," "Clocks," and "Amsterdam" bring to mind the passionate sound of U2 and the pure energy of Radiohead. A must!