LE SSERAFIM Pureflow Tour, LA — Stronger Than the Album
LE SSERAFIM played Crypto.com Arena on September 16, the group's sixth North American stop on the Pureflow Tour and its return to Los Angeles eleven months after their last visit. This review is built from the setlist the group ran three nights earlier in Anaheim, ticketing and venue data for the Los Angeles show, and the critical record around Pureflow Pt. 1 - not firsthand attendance. What follows can speak to what the group is choosing to play and how that material has landed elsewhere on this tour; it can't speak to how any single moment read live inside Crypto.com Arena that night.
My overall assessment is that LE SSERAFIM is touring a stronger show than the album that's supposed to be carrying it, because the setlist leans hardest on the tracks critics and fans agree work, even though the record underneath - Pureflow Pt. 1 - remains the most divisive thing the group has put out.
The Anaheim show three days prior opened with "BOOMPALA," the album's lead-off track and the one song from Pureflow Pt. 1 nobody agrees on. Built around an interpolation of "Macarena," it split listeners on Album of the Year down the middle - some called it the album's most fearless swing, others called it a ruined sample. Leading a stadium set with your most argued-over song is a bold choice, and on a tour built for momentum, it works: the crowd doesn't need to like the source material to react to the drop.
The stronger stretch of the Anaheim setlist came later, with "CELEBRATION," "Creatures" and "Saki" - three tracks that, unlike "BOOMPALA," draw close to unanimous praise even from reviewers who found the rest of Pureflow Pt. 1 thin. IZM's Korean critics gave the album a middling 1.5 out of 5 stars, and even that lukewarm review singled out "iffy iffy" as the one track everybody likes - a song built on a two-minute runtime that feels, by most accounts, too short for how well it works. If the group left it in the Los Angeles set (it wasn't part of the Anaheim run, at least not in what's been logged), that omission would be the show's most notable gap.
What the Los Angeles date adds that the Anaheim show didn't have is "Made My Night," the group's new single, folded in five days after its September 11 release and only days after LE SSERAFIM performed it on "The Jennifer Hudson Show" - their first American television stage for the song. Slotting a week-old single into an arena set already built around a different album is a risk; unlike the Pureflow tracks, "Made My Night" hasn't been performance-tested on this stage, and how it sits next to songs the crowd already knows is the one genuine unknown of the night.
Where the show runs on more certain ground is in older catalog: "ANTIFRAGILE," "CRAZY" and "SPAGHETTI" have carried LE SSERAFIM's sets since the Crazy and Unforgiven eras, and Anaheim's run through them, alongside "1-800-hot-n-fun" and "Perfect Night," suggests a back half built to close strong regardless of how the newer material tests. That's the tour's real strategy: treat Pureflow Pt. 1 as a source of highlights rather than a set to run start to finish, and let the catalog do the closing work.
The tension in the album - bold experimentation that doesn't always land, next to a small handful of songs that land completely - is also the tension in the tour itself. Korean critics who caught the Incheon opening nights in July praised the choreography and the members' visible appreciation for the crowd, without pretending the source material was consistent. Nothing in what's been reported from the North American leg contradicts that: this is a five-person group performing at a level the songs don't always match.
Pureflow Pt. 1 is out now on Source Music. The Pureflow Tour continues to Tacoma on September 20 and San Jose on September 23, with European dates beginning in Prague on October 25.
