09 December 2025

CODEX SERAFINI – Mother, Give Your Children Sanity (2025, LP/CD Riot Season/Echodelick Records)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Riot Season (UK) / Echodelick Records (USA)

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Bright Green Vinyl (Housed in a gloss finished outer sleeve with double-sided insert), 300 copies

Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition, Gate fold case

Release Date: 14 Nov 2025

The 5 Red Psych Tunics – a nickname I gave them in my previous review – are back! Not, that they had ever left… Codex Serafini crash back into our dimension like sentient debris from a forgotten Saturnian ritual, still humming with interplanetary static and red-tunic fever. Ever since their first transmissions — Serpents of Enceladus, that molten cassette-relic from 2020 and 2023’s debut The Imprecation of Anima (read my review here) (No 7 in the TOP 50+1 Albums of 2023, check list) — they’ve felt less like a band and more like a coded summons from the outer rings, a five-headed oracle briefly masquerading as humans somewhere in Sussex. I said it before: they’re one of the most unusual and dangerously exciting psych entities circling Earth, and nothing they’ve done since has proven me wrong.

With “Mother, Give Your Children Sanity”, they spiral back, shedding comet-dust and sanity in equal measure. Recorded with Wayne Adams at Bear Bites Horse Studio, this new offering is a ritual, a tantrum, a cosmic nervous breakdown disguised as an album. Born from the band’s shared gravitational pulse — their love, their pain, their planetary struggle — “Mother, Give Your Children Sanity” feels like a message beamed from a collapsing star: overwhelming, beautiful, and absolutely necessary to hear before it disappears again into the void.

The band states: “This album grew from our shared, deep connection we have to one another and reflects both the power of nature and the struggles we all experience as human beings on this planet. We are grateful to have made it with people we love and respect, and we’re excited to finally share it with everyone out there”…

“Mother, Give Your Children Sanity” contains 6 tracks, equally divided on the 2 sides of the vinyl album. The opener, “Pitying Them For Giving Life” (3:25) introduces a pandemonium of sounds from the very first second — a frantic feast of Psych energies colliding with feral female vocals and that razor-edged sax. The result is a dark, goth-tinged, punk-attitude atmosphere that hits instantly. Intriguing, electrifying, impossible to ignore. A shift of scenery with the next “Cause And Effect” (6:59), slower, darker, more distant. The vocalist spits the words like a warning, while the sax and the band build a tremendous post-punk/psych landscape of rebellion. This track feels born for the stage — sweat, adrenaline, fire — and its ritualistic ending seals the spell beautifully. Heaviness rules from the start on, “Keep The Mask That Fits” (9:07). A mid-tempo descent that briefly hints at long-lost Sabbath shadows before revealing itself as something far more adventurous and darkly psychedelic. The track drags you slowly downward — into haze, ceremony, and mental dissolution — with inarticulate screams adding a mysterious, almost supernatural tension. A slow fall into Hades… Side ‘B’ detonates with a dark, heavy sax-a-delic anthem called “Alpha Sista With The Heel To The Mouth First” (6:17) — goth-leaning, psych-punk flirting, thick with attitude. The sax leads like a deranged prophet, pushing the whole track into a parallel, shadow-drenched dimension. A hazy, doom-soaked atmosphere opens the title track, “Mother, Give Your Children Sanity” (6:11). Everything moves in slow motion. The vocalist hovers between singing, speaking, reciting — or communicating with things beyond Earth. At times operatic, always dark, always cold. A beautifully faraway piece of Dark Psych, both magical and unsettling. Eventually, the album comes to an end with “Marching Like A Toad” (8:36), a psychedelic, tribal, march-like journey that morphs into a punk-a-delic eruption with a sneaky jazzy pulse underneath. Ritualistic and mind-bending — imagine Uncle Frank, Captain Beefheart, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad jamming in a spiritual commune alongside the Source Family. Then suddenly the temperature drops: the music collapses into an ambient-industrial void, leaving us suspended in abstract, mysterious silence…

In conclusion, “Mother, Give Your Children Sanity” doesn’t simply conclude — it withdraws, like a cosmic presence pulling its shadow back into the ether. Codex Serafini once again prove that they operate on their own wavelength: part ritual, part rebellion, part abstract transmission from a dimension where Psych mutates freely without rules or gravity. This second album isn’t just a continuation of their journey; it feels like a deeper initiation, a deliberate step into stranger territories where heaviness, mysticism, and avant-punk impulses coexist in volatile harmony. Few bands today manage to sound this unearthly while still channeling something fundamentally human — fear, connection, delirium, yearning. Codex Serafini do it naturally, almost instinctively, as if they’re not composing songs but decoding signals. The result is an album that haunts long after it ends, echoing like a ritual you’re not entirely sure, you were supposed to witness. Whatever comes next from this Saturnian order, one thing is certain: they have already carved their own constellation in the psych underground, and it’s only getting brighter… and weirder… One of the Best Albums of 2025… TimeLord Michalis

Tracklist

A1	Pitying Them For Giving Life	3:25
A2	Cause And Effect	6:59
A3	Keep The Mask That Fits	9:07
B1	Alpha Sista With The Heel To The Mouth First	6:17
B2	Mother, Give Your Children Sanity	6:11
B3	Marching Like A Toad	8:36