Molly made it out by challenging Rappaport with a high-stakes bet. She bet that when SDFC released the single “Apocalypse Dance,” the song would perform well enough to support an album release. If she was right, SDFC would release Cause Apocalyptic as a separate EP. If “Apocalypse Dance” didn’t perform, they would release the two-disc version of Cause Célèbrety. Rappaport accepted the bet and the “Apocalypse Dance” single was released on November 17, followed by the music video on November 30.
“Apocalypse Dance,” a gutsy, throaty number in a minor key, debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart — Molly’s best charting debut. “Apocalypse Dance” was also Molly Metropolis’s fifth consecutive single to hit number one. Molly won the bet, so she got her way.
At that time, SDFC decided to release the album on January 25, 2009. Horner, Molly, and Rappaport spent a few weeks polishing, fixating on minutia in the mixing process. SDFC made the album available for pre-order in December, so that it could be given as a holiday gift. Cause Apocalyptic was certified Gold before Christmas Day.
On the back of the “Apocalypse Dance” single and the steady sales of Cause Apocalyptic, Molly Metro’s Apocalypse Ball tour went ahead as planned in late November. Her garish performances of her unreleased tracks also helped increase buzz about the album. On the Internet, fans established warring camps of “spoiler” and “anti-spoiler” sects. The first watched crude cell-phone videos of Molly’s performances on YouTube, and downloaded bootleg live albums, while the “anti-spoiler” fans avoided hearing the songs before buying the album or attending the live show.
Then, eleven days before the album’s scheduled release date, Molly Metropolis vanished.
As Molly’s disappearance remained unsolved, Cause Apocalyptic became an even more contested issue. Would SDFC release the album on its scheduled date or would they wait for Molly Metro to return? Molly’s fans took to their Twitters, Tumblrs, and Facebook pages to demand the album that most of the media was already referring to as “Molly’s last.” Music journalists and bloggers spread a rumor that the album would be coming out on time, but the track list would be “retooled.” Fans then demanded that SDFC release “Molly’s version” of the album.
Despite the frantic tone and pace of speculation, SDFC refused to release a statement more concrete than: “We have the utmost respect for Molly Metropolis and her work. We are attempting to execute her vision of the album.” In fact, SDFC was attempting to execute a version of the album that, thematically at least, resonated with Molly’s status of missing-in-action. The bloggers were right; they revised the track list. Originally, Molly and Horner arranged the eight new songs in the following order:
1. Apocalypse Dance
2. Party Babylon
3. Beneath the Pavement
4. La Deluge
5. I’ll Find You
6. Bang Bang
7. Dance ’Til We Drop
8. Lost
For the final version, Rappaport added an additional track, “Maps (Find Me),” which had been recorded in Molly’s salad days but was never included on an album, and reworked the order of the songs to emphasize the album’s dark lyrical content. The album’s final track list was:
1. Apocalypse Dance
2. Lost
3. Maps (Find Me)
4. I’ll Find You
5. Dance ’Til We Drop
6. La Deluge
7. Beneath the Pavement
8. Party Babylon
9. Bang Bang
The critical reception for Cause Apocalyptic mimicked the reception of Sylvia Plath’s famous book Ariel and other Poems, published two years after her death by suicide, with the order of the poems reworked by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. At first, critics psychoanalyzed Plath, pulling evidence of her suicidal thoughts from every poem; later, they criticized Hughes, saying he reworked the order of the poems to make Plath’s death seem premeditated. Talia F. Gold wrote, in her Slate review of Cause Apocalyptic, “The album sounds like a synth-soaked cry for help. Even if we skip over the dark lyrics from the album’s first single, ‘Apocalypse,’ that just leads us to ‘Lost,’ which opens with Molly sing-speaking ‘You said “Get Lost” / So lost I got / Now we all get lost.’ ” Apparently, Gold didn’t care to share the final line of that quatrain: “In my music.” (Though, in her defense, the opening lines of first verse seem to predict Molly’s disappearance, their uncanny nature multiplied when the existence of early demos of the song show Metro must’ve written it in late 2009, just weeks before she vanished: “Among the missing, I am missing you / My heart is twisting, I’m still into you.”) A few days later, Slate published another piece, this one by Deb Stone, headlined: “Did SDFC Make Metro Go Dark?”
Every major review of the album touched on the lyrics’ dark tone. The album sounds like a death rattle; journalists didn’t even have to stretch to find evidence to support stories about Molly’s “depression” or “dark moods”—but that didn’t stop some people from reaching. Roger Popdidian of Rolling Stone, for example, interpreted the poppy, benign “Party Babylon” as the inner monologue of a depressed girl hiding from the comfort of her loved ones in the anonymity of a loud club.h
While the rest of the world was dissecting the album, Taer used the new wave of Molly Metropolis — related Internet dialogue to recharge her batteries and revitalize her morale for her search. On a cold day in late January 2009, Taer loaded Cause Apocalyptic onto her iPod, and walked through the city with Molly in her ears and her nose buried in Berliner’s sketchpad of drawn maps.i
Along with the lines he drew to represent each of the streets he had walked on, Berliner used a series of symbols on his maps: blue X’s, red arrows, and black dots. Taer went to the streets that she knew Berliner had walked on. She compared the buildings and businesses on those streets with the marks on the map. She focused on a small red arrow pointing to a blue X, which appeared just south of the triangle of streets. She also examined a second red arrow, pointing to the intersection of two streets on the triangle.
Taer pondered the symbols all day and, getting nowhere, she headed for home. She looked up from Berliner’s map and found she had walked to the entrance of the L stop at the intersection of North Street and North Clybourn.
She had thought a blue X might mean a certain kind of building, but as she boarded the train she had a new thought: maybe the blue X’s were L stops, and red arrows indicated any place Berliner went into, whether it be a business, residence, L stop, et cetera. If she was right, the blue X with the red arrow pointing to it, the combination of symbols she’d been trying to decipher all day, could indicate Berliner had taken the L from the same North Street and North Clybourn station Taer had just used herself. The second red arrow, then, meant he went into another, unidentified building at the intersection of two streets.
Taer hurriedly scribbled the idea down in her journal, with some commentary: “This could be a non idea. The red arrows might not mean ‘places he went to,’ the blue X’s might not mean L stops. And even if they do, the red arrow pointing to the intersection could just indicate a coffee shop he went into or something. But maybe this is actually something.”