Song Review:: LE SSERAFIM: PUREFLOW, Pt. 1- BOOMPALA

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  • Release date: 2026 May 22
  • Album tracklist: Pureflow, BOOMPALA, CELEBRATION, Creatures, iffy iffy, Need Your Company, Sonder, Saki (feat Aliya's Interlude), Irony, Trust Exercise, Liminal Space
  • Album runtime: 27 minutes

 Well, well, well, what do we have here? A HYBE group title track that's almost three minutes long. We haven't seen one of those in a while. Does that mean that we're finally moving back to the era of decently lengthed songs? Can I be tentatively excited?

If this isn't an afrobeats song, well then I need to get better acquainted with the genre, though I hesitate to do any genre the disservice of being applied to an instrumental that fades into the background so strongly, it almost might as well not even be there. Almost three minutes of runtime wasted on a song that might as well be the fan I've got going. It's impressive because there is volume at the end and a sonic change of scenery, but it's too little too late. What this song probably could have benefitted from is an actual a cappella section, to fully interrupt the song and give the members a chance to carry the song and actually do some hyping. 

All that time and for what? As I learned from my recent post on Cider by Yezi, part of good rapping is in the delivery and the delivery with this song is mostly mumbled at the lower end of their registers to try to produce an air of coolness, but it's the exact kind of tonal repetition that makes a song uninteresting. And oh, look who I found in the credits. I'd love to see Hitman Bang give them a song that actually makes use of their voices and abilities instead of a song that tears the teeth out of them. Part of the joy of the original Macarena is the high energy, but this one mutes that energy with the rapping and sucks most of the color out of the vocals, which are still repetitive but at least they don't immediately fade to background noise, unlike the rapping which does the entire group a disservice.

I'm not going to immediately dismiss the choreography based on what Yunjin said, but I'm not inspired with hope and confidence. Hopefully I'm wrong. I want to be wrong.

I love how colorful this is. I love how weird and fun this music video is. I love how much is going on. I'm underwhelmed by the choreography, but what we get in the music video is more or less what I'd expect from the song itself. Maybe a live stage will be different.



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