Kim Chaewon Returns From Injury to Finally Perform That 10M-View 'BOOMPALA' Opening Live

Two months of rehab, 10 million YouTube views, and a fanbase running on highlights footage. Kim Chaewon finally walked out and did it for real.

LE SSERAFIM opened their second world tour, PUREFLOW, across two nights on July 11 and 12 at Inspire Arena in Incheon, and the moment everyone had been waiting for landed exactly as advertised. Kim Chaewon's opening choreography sequence from "BOOMPALA," the lead single off the group's second full-length album, had racked up over 10 million views on YouTube from the performance video alone before she'd ever done it on a live stage. A neck injury pulled her out of recent group activities, leaving the group to perform as four. Saturday night, she was back.

When that opening sequence hit, the arena responded accordingly. The kind of crowd reaction that reads even on a shaky fan-cam, the walls-of-screaming kind. Chaewon matched it: the eye contact, the precision, the pull that made the original clip go viral in the first place. All of it, live.

Online, the momentum didn't wait for Sunday morning. "Kim Chaewon BOOMPALA opening" trended in real time on social platforms after both nights, fans effectively replaying the cycle of virality that started back in May. The fanbase piled on a nickname portmanteau, combining her long-running fan-given nickname Ssamu with BOOMPALA to get Ssampala, and the phrase "the original Ssampala is back" circulated widely enough to function as a post-show rallying cry.

Beyond the comeback moment, the concert was also the first large-scale performance since the second album dropped in May. That meant live debuts for several album cuts: "Irony," "Effy Effy," and "Trust Exercise" all got their first proper stage outings and drew strong responses from the crowd.

The production design earned its own notices. The stage used a curved structural layout that the venue framing played against effectively, a visual approach that fits PUREFLOW's stated ethos of strength through vulnerability, LE SSERAFIM's recurring message that fear acknowledged is what makes them harder. The tour name itself is an anagram of POWERFUL, which is either a clever piece of wordplay or a very on-brand flex, depending on how you're keeping score.

Source Music has not announced additional PUREFLOW dates beyond the Incheon opening weekend.