walking upstream…
Le Sserafim
Le Sserafim debuted on May 2, 2022, as a five-member South Korean group under Source Music, a HYBE sub-label — the name an anagram-styled rendering of "I'm fearless." Original member Kim Garam departed two months later, leaving Sakura Miyawaki, Kim Chaewon, Huh Yunjin, Kazuha, and Hong Eunchae. Kazuha spent fifteen years as a competitive ballet dancer, training in the Netherlands, before COVID-19 pushed K-pop auditions online and pulled her toward a different stage. The October 2022 EP "Antifragile" became the group's first release to sell a million copies and made them the fastest K-pop girl group onto the US Billboard 200; the 2023 album "Unforgiven" gave them their first Circle Album Chart number one. The sound — genre-restless pop built on hip-hop swagger, drum and bass, and imported disco muscle — plays the members' own record collections out loud.
the sound in question
2022
AntifragileLe Sserafim
walk the tributaries ↓
Chic1970s · Disco / Funk / R&B
When Le Sserafim's Huh Yunjin learned that Chic's Nile Rodgers would play guitar on their 2023 title track, she wasn't guessing at a legend's reputation. "I grew up in the States, so of course I knew," she told GRAMMY.com. Sakura remembers the session itself: "When Nile first played the guitar for us, I was completely blown away." That's not a name-check — it's the same live, freestyle guitar work Rodgers has built five decades of hits around, from Chic's own disco singles through Bowie and Daft Punk, now recorded onto a Le Sserafim track by his own hands.
listen: upstream & here
1979
Good TimesChic
2023
UnforgivenLe Sserafim
listen forCue Chic's 1979 "Good Times" and then "Unforgiven" back to back: the chicken-scratch rhythm guitar under Rodgers's rapid up-down strumming is the same instrument, played by the same hands, forty-four years apart. On "Good Times" it rides Chic bassist Bernard Edwards to build a groove from nothing; on "Unforgiven" that identical syncopated funk figure threads through a K-pop production built around a sampled whistle from film composer Ennio Morricone — proof the guitar part travels intact even as everything around it changes.
BLACKPINK2020s · K-pop / Hip hop / EDM
Before she was an idol, Kazuha was fifteen years into competitive ballet when she stumbled on BLACKPINK's "Boombayah" video on YouTube. "I was like, What is this whole new world?" she told the HYBE artist platform Weverse Magazine. "The members of BLACKPINK are cool and pretty at the same time and really charismatic... Not the cute girl image, but like a cool woman." That exact ambition — cool over cute — became her own pitch for Le Sserafim's debut single: "'Fearless'... lets us show our thoughts and feelings and look cool doing it."
listen: upstream & heresource: Weverse Magazine — Kazuha pre-debut interview (BLACKPINK's "Boombayah" video as the moment she wanted to perform; "Fearless" as her own answer to it) ↗
2016
BoombayahBLACKPINK
2022
FearlessLe Sserafim
listen forSet "Boombayah" against "Fearless" and the blueprint Kazuha named directly comes through: a lean, bass-forward beat under alternating rap verses, landing on a hook that lands hard rather than sweetly. Both choruses are built from chanted, staccato phrasing instead of a soaring melody line — the voice performing confidence rather than prettiness, which is precisely the distinction Kazuha drew between "cool" and "cute" when she explained what first pulled her toward the stage.
Doja Cat2020s · Pop rap / Hip hop / R&B
Asked which artists shaped them, two Le Sserafim members converged on the same name, unprompted. "I loved listening to her songs before I saw her onstage, but when I saw her onstage, it was just astonishing," Kazuha told the fashion site Who What Wear, of Doja Cat. Huh Yunjin agreed: "She's very involved in her stage presentation and her work in general. She definitely inspires me to be self-reliant in my creative process." The admiration surfaced on record in 2024, when Korean critic Lee Seung Won flagged the group's "Smart" as sonically close to Doja Cat's "Woman."
listen: upstream & heresource: Who What Wear — "LE SSERAFIM Is the New Girl Group Posed to Take Over K-Pop" (Kazuha and Huh Yunjin both name Doja Cat as a creative touchstone) ↗
2021
WomanDoja Cat
2024
SmartLe Sserafim
listen forPlay Doja Cat's 2021 single "Woman" against "Smart" and the shared move is a loping Afrobeat groove under a clipped, syncopated vocal delivery — short rhythmic bursts landing just off the beat rather than stretched into melody. Critic Lee Seung Won called it "the lazy modification of familiar sounds," a harsher read than the members' own admiration for Doja Cat's stagecraft — but the specific groove he pointed to really is audible, bar for bar, across both records.