Songfacts®:

• In "Now Or Never Now," Metric frontwoman Emily Haines sings about giving up the fight against grief and despair. She's tried many times to walk away, but a certain song keeps popping up on the radio every time she's nearly free. It pulls her back into the shadows, and now she's too tired to keep fighting. She needs to sink into the silence and sadness of the moment and heal from there.
• This was the third single released from Art of Doubt, Metric's seventh studio album. It hit #11 on the Canadian rock charts.
• Haines wrote this song with Metric guitarist Jimmy Shaw. In a 2018 interview, Forbes asked Haines about the juxtaposition of dark lyrics and up-tempo music in this song. Haines answered:
  
  "I'm fascinated in general with the process of making something work. In the case of Metric, I think from the outset this tension between dark introspection and strong adrenaline-ized energy has been the defining characteristic of our music. From day one, when Jimmy and I started working together, that's been how we have gone about it - I present him with slow, intensely felt and dangerously honest songs that are like small solitary rooms and he finds a way to build them into these towering structures. That's how I see it, it's like sonic architecture."
• Emily Haynes explained the creative process and inspiration behind this song in a 2018 tour diary: "'Now Or Never Now,' the chorus:
  
  Only silence can restore the sense of place I had before
  Only silence can repair my sense of self I lost somewhere
  
  That song started as a piano melody, like deep hibernation before my life went sideways (things were actually OK), but a deep hibernation like three winters ago, and it was just the melody on the piano [singing] and then the bass movement on the left hand and that whole melody [singing] and as well as that other melody, it was all there. But lyrically it was like:
  
  To permanently be in the truth and to evolve out of deceit
  To confidently follow the first feeling I have before you speak
  So carelessly you recklessly lose the one that let you used to be me
  
  That was what the verses were. And then I don't think I have another verse, and it sounds interesting, and I kind of know what I was getting at, but that's an example of my bad being like, 'You gotta help us out here, what are you saying? I don't understand.' And there's like, truth, I didn't really know either what I was saying.
  
  So then after Pagans, we did a whole elaborate recording process of a bunch of songs that never saw the light of day, and that one went through a whole incarnation with like a 20-piece New Orleans jazz-like funeral march arrangement that we recorded in a church, that was like a so crazy version, which was really cool but it's not Metric, it's like we really went out there on that. So then coming all the way back around to making this record, I could not finish that song to save my life. I ended up driving my car and parking in a parking lot in the middle of winter and being like, 'You can't leave until you finish this. What are you addressing and talking about? Now, stop being flowery and vague. Nobody knows what you mean, you don't know what you mean.' And it sucked.
  
  I was freezing, I was in my car for five hours and I was just playing as we had the track, they had developed the sound and all the sonics were there, all the parts were there, melody, everything's there, this was the last week of making the record, and then finally I was like, 'OK I have it!' Mike came to the studio and they were like 'Yeah you did it,' and I sang it on my birthday. It's uplifting but for me that would still like Dark Saturdays, like so scrappy there, but 'Now Or Never Now' is still like Whoo.. I still feel pretty close to the place I was when I wrote that." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France