No way out

With his Cure, Robert Smith built a world where sadness was sublimated into a new expressive language, one capable of influencing generations of artists. From early singles like "Boys Don't Cry" to dark-era classics such as "One Hundred Years" and "Faith", right through to mature tracks like "Pictures Of You" and "A Letter To Elise", the English band has managed to turn vulnerability and melancholy into a form of pop accessible even beyond the boundaries of goth and indie.

But among the countless melancholy-steeped songs written by Smith, there's one that the author himself has always regarded with unease. A song so bleak that even performing it live proved difficult, as the magazine Far Out recently recalled.

The story dates back to 2000, when with the album "Bloodflowers," Smith effectively closed a trilogy that began with "Pornography" and continued with "Disintegration" — three works he has called "definitive" for the Cure's identity. "Bloodflowers" broadens the band's sonic range while retaining an elegiac, contemplative tone. Yet it also contains one of the bleakest songs in their catalogue. A song called "There Is No If."

Built on a minimal framework, somewhere between rarefied rock and electronic touches in keeping with the aesthetic of the late Nineties (the implicit reference point being Radiohead's "OK Computer"), the song is played entirely by Smith himself. The lyrics offer no way out: a sequence of mistakes, failures and loss leading to an epilogue with no redemption. It was precisely this "absence of a way out" that made Smith initially resist including it on the record. He only agreed to it after the rest of the band insisted. In a 2000 interview he explained it was the only track on the album he truly found depressing: "There's no way out in that song – everything goes wrong and then you die." He admitted he even hesitated to sing it. Little wonder, then, that "There Is No If" had a short life in concert: it was dropped from the setlists after 2002.

The "if" of the title refers to the inevitability of death. In the song, Smith's lover repeatedly makes the seemingly simple statement "if you die… so do I." This is, of course, a paraphrase of the romantic cliché "I couldn't live without you." Smith reinterprets that sentiment in a negative light, pointing out that in reality they will live on without each other, and that both they and their love are inevitably doomed to die. And the ending leaves precious little room for any optimistic reading…

You yawned and I had to say it over

I said, "I love you I said", you didn't say a word

Just held your hands to your shining eyes

And I watched as the tears ran through your fingers

Held your hands to your shining eyes and cried

“If you die”, you said, “So do I”, you said

But it ends the day you see how it is

There is no always forever, just this, just this

“If you die”, you said, “So do I”, you said

But it ends the day you understand

There is no if

Curiously, after the release of “Bloodflowers”, it was precisely “There Is No If”, performed in complete solitude, that many singled out as a sign of a possible new solo path, something Smith himself hinted was on the cards. “Actually, the songs I left off ‘Bloodflowers’ for my own album don’t sound anything like it,” he would later say, floating the idea of a project outside the band. Too bad that solo record never saw the light of day. “If in years to come I decide to do something else under the name The Cure, I will. You can burn bridges, but you can always rebuild them,” Smith added at the time. And so it would prove to be...

“There Is No If” remains a rare case in which the gloom that is the trademark of both the Cure and Robert Smith went beyond even its own author's tolerance threshold. That said, it's worth remembering that although he has always been linked to the darker side of pop, Smith has often rejected the idea that his songs are simply “depressing”, preferring to describe them as “tracks that explore areas of human experience that other bands tend to avoid”. Except, that is, in the case of “There Is No If”...

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01/04/2026