Let's be honest. When King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard dropped the music video for If Not Now, Then When? back in late 2020—teasing what would eventually be the 2021 album L.W.—it felt like a fever dream. But the roots of that song, the frantic energy of 2019, and the sheer environmental anxiety baked into the track's DNA represent a turning point for the band. Most people remember 2019 as the year of Infest the Rats' Nest, the band's pivot into thrash metal. Yet, the seeds for their microtonal exploration and the specific existential dread of "If Not Now, Then When?" were planted during that chaotic world tour.
The song isn't just a catchy piece of Anatolian rock-inspired funk. It's a heavy-handed, desperate plea regarding the climate crisis. If you look back at the band's trajectory in 2019, they were playing to massive crowds, watching the world literally catch fire in their home country of Australia, and grappling with the realization that "business as usual" was a death sentence.
The 2019 Connection: From Rats' Nest to Microtones
Why do we link If Not Now, Then When? 2019 and the subsequent years so closely? Because 2019 was the last year of "normalcy" before the band retreated into their home studios to experiment with the microtonal guitars they’d largely set aside since Flying Microtonal Banana. During the 2019 tour, Stu Mackenzie and the rest of the Melbourne septet (as they were then) were seeing the effects of the climate shift firsthand.
The song itself, while released as a single in December 2020, is the creative byproduct of that 2019 exhaustion. It’s a frantic, jittery composition. It uses the 24-TET tuning system, which allows for those "notes between the notes" that sound inherently "off" or "unsettling" to Western ears. That's the point. You can't write a song about the literal end of the world using standard major scales. It would feel fake.
The Animation That Broke the Internet (Sorta)
We have to talk about Dr. D. That’s the animator, Dr. Phee, who spent months hand-animating the music video. If you haven't seen it, it's basically a cosmic horror trip through the evolution and destruction of life. It’s gross. It’s beautiful. It features a lot of melting bodies and celestial entities eating planets.
When the video dropped, it signaled a shift in how the band handled their visual identity. They moved away from the lo-fi, VHS-style aesthetics of Jason Galea’s early work into something more cinematic and high-concept. The video mirrors the lyrical urgency: "When the forest's ran out of juice / When the sky is a different hue." This isn't poetry for the sake of poetry. It’s a literal description of the Australian bushfires that dominated headlines in late 2019 and early 2020.
Musically, What's Actually Happening?
If you're a gear head, this track is a masterclass in syncopation. The drums (mostly handled by Michael Cavanagh) provide this tight, funk-inspired backbone that keeps the microtonal chaos from falling apart. It's in 4/4 time, but it feels like it’s slipping.
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- Microtonal Guitars: Custom-made instruments with extra frets.
- The Clavinet: That "superstitious" Stevie Wonder sound, but put through a blender.
- The Vocal Stack: High-pitched, almost feminine falsettos that have become Stu Mackenzie's trademark.
The song serves as a bridge. It takes the heaviness of their 2019 metal phase and applies it to a more "danceable" but equally terrifying format. It’s the sound of a band realizing they can’t just keep playing the same three chords if they want to express the complexity of modern survival.
Why the "2019" Tag Matters for Collectors
For the vinyl nerds and the "Gizzverse" devotees, the period between 2019 and the release of L.W. is considered a golden era of productivity. The band released several live albums from that 2019 tour (Live in Adelaide, Live in Paris, Live in Brussels) to raise money for fire relief.
When people search for If Not Now, Then When? 2019, they are often looking for the specific timeline of when the "microtonal trilogy" was conceived. While K.G. and L.W. came out in 2020 and 2021 respectively, the demos and the philosophical groundwork were laid during that 2019 world tour. It was a moment of peak physical performance for the band before they were forced into isolation.
The Message: Is It Too Late?
The title is a rhetorical question. It's borrowed from the famous saying by Hillel the Elder: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"
The band isn't trying to be your rabbi, though. They’re using the quote to point out the hypocrisy of environmental "delayism." We see this in the lyrics where they mock the idea of waiting for a "better time" to fix the planet. In 2019, the conversation was about plastic straws. By the time this song came out, the conversation was about whether we’d even have a habitable coast in fifty years.
Honestly, it’s a bit depressing. But Gizzard has this way of making the apocalypse sound like a party you actually want to attend. They don't preach; they just describe the fire while playing a really cool riff.
Impact on the "Gizzverse" Lore
For those deep in the fan theories, this song is often cited as the "beginning of the end" in the chronological narrative of their discography. Some fans argue that the events of Infest the Rats' Nest (rich people fleeing to Mars) happen because the warnings in If Not Now, Then When? were ignored.
It’s a fun way to look at it. Does every album connect? Maybe. But even if you don't care about the lore, the musical evolution is undeniable. You can hear the transition from the garage-rock scuzz of their early days into the sophisticated, polyrhythmic powerhouse they became by 2019.
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How to Actually Listen to This Era
If you want to understand the weight of this track, don't just stream it on crappy phone speakers.
- Find the L.W. vinyl if you can—the pressing quality is actually pretty decent for a DIY band.
- Watch the music video on the biggest screen you have. The Dr. D animation has details you'll miss on a small screen.
- Listen to the Live in Melbourne '21 version. It captures the raw energy of the band finally getting to play these "lockdown songs" in front of a real, breathing crowd.
Actionable Takeaways for Fans and Newbies
If you're trying to wrap your head around King Gizzard's mid-career pivot, start with the 2019 live recordings. They provide the context for why the band felt the need to get "weird" again with microtones.
Check out the "Bootlegger" series on their official website. They’ve basically given away the stems and masters for many of these tracks, encouraging fans to make their own remixes and pressings. It’s a radical business model that started gaining steam around the time this song was written.
Finally, look at the lyrics of If Not Now, Then When? not as a doom-and-gloom prophecy, but as a prompt. The band shifted their entire touring operation to be more sustainable after 2019—reducing plastic, opting for better travel routes, and being vocal about carbon offsets. It shows that the "2019" era wasn't just a musical phase; it was a wake-up call that changed how they operate as a multi-million dollar independent entity.
The song remains a staple of their live sets for a reason. It's fast, it's uncomfortable, and it's 100% King Gizzard. If you’re waiting for a better time to get into their microtonal stuff, well... you know what the song says.