LE SSERAFIM PUREFLOW Pt.1 — A Party Record With a Fear Problem at Its Core
The title track samples "Macarena." That's not a criticism - not yet, anyway. "BOOMPALA" takes the 1993 Los del Río hit, strips it to its bones, and drapes LE SSERAFIM's choreography-first energy over it in a way that earns about half of what it's going for. The crowd-and-confetti music video commits fully to the joke. The song itself is less certain about whether it's a joke.
That tension - between surrender and seriousness, between party-record pleasure and something more architecturally ambitious - runs through all 29 minutes and 51 seconds of PUREFLOW Pt.1, LE SSERAFIM's second studio album and first full-length since their 2022 debut. It's a better record than it looks from the outside. It's also a less coherent one than it wants to be.
The album's most convincing stretch is its darker first half. "CELEBRATION," the April 24 pre-release, is techno and hardstyle at 2:33 - a two-and-a-half-minute controlled demolition produced by Softest Hard and 13, the in-house Source Music production team. It's the album's most aggressive track and probably its best: Huh Yunjin's vocal sits above the industrial stomp without straining toward it, which is harder than it sounds. "Creatures" follows with a mid-tempo groove that lets the members' voices do structural work instead of just riding a beat. Back to back, those two tracks suggest a more interesting album than PUREFLOW Pt.1 ultimately delivers.
"BOOMPALA" is positioned as the centerpiece but functions more like a reset button. By the time the "Macarena" interpolation kicks in, the album has established a darker, more textured palette - and then abandons it for a track that wants to replicate the viral simplicity of "Perfect Night," LE SSERAFIM's 2023 Halloween single, without the seasonal hook that made that song work. "iffy iffy" and "Need Your Company" occupy similar territory: bright, frictionless pop that fits comfortably inside the group's commercial range and doesn't push past it. The Aliyah's Interlude collaboration on "Saki" is the album's most sonically distinctive moment - the production from Tropkillaz introduces a low-frequency sway that's absent almost everywhere else - but it arrives late and feels underconnected to the rest of the tracklist.
The album's framing - "Pureflow" as a concept of water, stillness, and fear faced head-on - is embedded more in the visual identity and liner notes than in the music itself. The closing track "Liminal Space" reaches toward that emotional territory and lands partially: its stripped production gives Kazuha and Huh Yunjin space they don't always get, and it's the only moment where the album's stated theme and sonic reality feel aligned. A 29-minute runtime is also genuinely short for a full studio album in 2026, which makes the two or three tracks that don't fully justify their presence more noticeable than they'd be on a longer record.
One real complication: Kim Chaewon, LE SSERAFIM's leader and one of the group's most consistent vocal anchors, recorded the album but is sitting out all promotional activities due to a neck injury. Source Music confirmed this before release. Her absence from the upcoming performance cycle isn't a knock on PUREFLOW Pt.1 as a recorded object - she's on it - but it shapes how the album will land for audiences who encounter it live first. The group's world tour, also titled PUREFLOW, begins in Incheon on July 11 across 32 performances in 23 cities.
PUREFLOW Pt.1 is out now via Source Music and HYBE. The PUREFLOW World Tour opens July 11 in Incheon, South Korea.
