The first song released from Poison Season, "Dream Lover", was posted on SoundCloud on May 21, 2015.[2] The album's release date, track list, and artwork were announced the same day.[2]
A second song from Poison Season, "Girl in a Sling", was released online on July 8, 2015.[3] On the same day, the music video for "Girl in a Sling", directed by David Galloway, was released.[4] The video cuts back and forth between shots of Bejar, who's working in a darkroom and singing in the shadows, and residential areas in decay. Director David Galloway explained in a press release that the video's tragic tone is meant to fit the album's overall vibe:
Bejar sings a lot about cities and girls and injury, sometimes all at the same time. Sometimes they are the same thing, as surreal novelists would have us believe. Besides, people like to see Dan sing—which he doesn't do a lot of in this video, but he does do a little bit. We wanted to make a video that dealt with central Destroyer themes: to some, Destroyer is a lech; to some, he is an arsonist; to some, he is a savior. To me, he is the consummate comedian, but he resists that role. So we decided to go the opposite way and make something sad, something tragic, something that fits the new record. The adage “comedy equals tragedy plus time” is attributed to Carol Burnett's mum. Or it might have been Steve Allen. Either way, I always want Dan to do physical comedy, but he resists. He's a natural, though. He's the Pacific Northwest's Buster Keaton, and I hope one day to share that with the world. One day. For now, though, there's just this sadness. This poison season.
A third song from Poison Season, "Times Square", was released on August 12, 2015 on SoundCloud.[5] On August 27, 2015, a day before Poison Season's release, a stop motion music video for "Times Square", directed by Shayne Ehman, was released.[6] The music video features Dan Bejar singing to the camera as a number of anthropomorphized forest friends rendered with stop-motion animation sing and dance along. The director, Shayne Ehman, described the process of making the video:
We ended up just wandering around New York til 3am and the city seemed completely dead. We could have been anywhere, really. I needed to get outside and shoot in natural light in order to serve as a sort of conduit for those 'forces of nature in love...' which seem to rule the song. I let the sun do its thing and let the earth do it's thing and watched time unfold. I watched the clouds unfold and unpack and packup. I was at their mercy, completely.
Poison Season received widespread critical acclaim from music critics upon its release. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 86, based on 26 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[9]
Jayson Greene of Pitchfork gave the album a favorable review stating, "Poison Season retains the sumptuous melancholy of Kaputt, leavening it with the elegant swoon of Nelson Riddle-era Frank Sinatra. There are string arrangements all over Poison Season, and they are gorgeously recorded: the orchestra on "Girl in a Sling" sounds like 180-gram vinyl even while in earbuds. Destroyer has always partly been a nostalgia project, even when Bejar's nostalgia was decidedly ersatz—his records aim to stir the feelings that classic recordings arouse in us. Streethawk hearkened back to glam-rock Bowie even if the resemblance was off, and the magic of Kaputt was partly that of a peculiar and gnomic figure like Bejar conjuring the jaded romanticism of Bryan Ferry. On Poison Season, he visits a different section of his record collection, one that predates rock'n'roll, and he applies all the studied love and imagination to the endeavor we've come to expect from him."
