'PUREFLOW', Pt. 1

The K-pop girl squad finds confidence in the face of fear. LE SSERAFIM love an anagram. With their 2022 launch, the K-pop girl squad rearranged the letters in the phrase “I’m fearless” into a group name meant to communicate a commitment to moving forward with confidence. On their second studio album, 2026’s ‘PUREFLOW’, Pt. 1, that confidence comes in spite of the members’ own fears. PUREFLOW is an anagram of “powerful”, and the 11-track album gets its thematic inspiration from a Frankenstein passage: “For I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” On the album’s spoken-word intro track, Kim Chaewon, Sakura, Huh Yunjin, Kazuha and Hong Eunchae flip Mary Shelley’s words for a new interpretation. “For we are not fearless, and therefore powerful,” they chant together. The album leads with the joyful frenzy of “Macarena”-sampling Latin house track “BOOMPALA” and techno thumper “CELEBRATION” before diving into the nuance of moodier tracks, including self-reflective R&B song “iffy iffy”, friendship ballad “Need Your Company” and pop waltz “Sonder”. LE SSERAFIM are at their most unapologetically confident on the hot-girl tirade “Saki”, which directly references their 2024 track “1-800-hot-n-fun”. By album’s end, however, LE SSERAFIM are looking toward the future. “Where are we going?” Kim Chaewon asks her co-members on “Liminal Space”—a sketch recorded while they were in a car in the middle of a busy schedule—before proclaiming an answer: “We are the destination ourselves.”