LE SSERAFIM PUREFLOW World Tour in Incheon — Five Members, Visibly Relieved to Be Five Again
Twenty minutes into the second night at Inspire Arena, Kim Chaewon performed "Sonder" live for the first time in front of a crowd that had spent the last two months not knowing when - or whether - she'd be back on this stage at all. She had missed the album's promotional cycle entirely, sidelined since May 19 with a neck injury her agency said required rest after treatment for neck pain. On July 12, she stood in the middle of a set built around a soft, domestic tableau - the other four members joking with each other, leaning on one another, resting together - and the song did something the choreography alone couldn't: it made the relief visible.
That's the frame the whole show operates under, whether SOURCE MUSIC intended it that way or not. PUREFLOW, LE SSERAFIM's second world tour, opened with two sold-out nights at the same Incheon venue where the group launched its first tour - a symbolic return the production leaned into with dancers in creature-inspired masks moving through the crowd before the group even appeared. But the emotional register of "five instead of four" sits underneath every big moment of the night, and the show is stronger when it acknowledges that directly than when it tries to power through on spectacle alone.
The spectacle mostly works. "BOOMPALA," the title track from May's "PUREFLOW pt. 1," arrived in ethnic-inspired styling that sharpened the song's identity, and the shift into "ANTIFRAGILE" and "CRAZY" right after gave the arena its loudest, most familiar stretch - older hits doing exactly the job older hits are supposed to do at a tour opener, which is remind everyone why they showed up in the first place. "SPAGHETTI" got a specially built dance break for these shows, and it's the point in the set where the choreography finally outran the emotional weight sitting on top of it, in a good way - 90 seconds where the show let itself just be a pop concert.
Where it doesn't fully land is the transition work between the album's two moods. PUREFLOW pt. 1 mixes punk rock, Latin pop, EDM and psychedelic pop across its tracklist, and the live show tries to carry all of that range inside one narrative arc - moving from "inner monsters and conflict" toward "release, heat and communal play," per the group's own framing. The idea is coherent on paper. In the room, the shift from "Trust Exercise" and "HOT" into the softer stretch built around "Sonder" reads more like a costume change than an emotional turn, and the momentum the earlier stretch built doesn't fully carry through the quieter section before "BOOMPALA" resets the energy from scratch.
Two live debuts anchored the night beyond Chaewon's return: "Need Your Company" and "Trust Exercise" both got their first performances here, alongside her live debuts on "Creatures" and "Sonder." The 120-minute set closed with "FEARLESS," a deliberate callback given that the group has described PUREFLOW as the chapter that follows the FEARLESS era - less about confronting fear, more about what comes after it. Whether that thesis fully justifies a five-month, 32-show run across 23 cities is a question the tour will keep answering as it goes. What Incheon answered clearly is a smaller one: whether the group could still function as five. It could.
This review draws on official setlist documentation, agency statements and press accounts of both Incheon shows rather than firsthand attendance; the read on crowd energy and sound mix in the room is secondhand and should be weighed accordingly.
The PUREFLOW World Tour continues through Asia, North America and Europe before closing with two nights in Manila on Dec. 5 and 6.
