Philadelphia’s Johnny Football Hero crawl back with “Contingency Plan,” their first full-length and the sound of a band done pretending things are okay. The emo shimmer is gone—what’s left is raw nerve and resignation. The record moves through the grind of debt, death, and disconnection, tracing the slow rot that comes when everything around you keeps crumbling and you’re expected to smile through it. It’s not about collapse in a cinematic way—it’s about the kind that happens quietly, paycheck to paycheck, until you forget who you were trying to be.
If you’ve been craving that twitchy, nerve-shot energy of At the Drive-In or the unhinged fretwork frenzy of The Fall of Troy, “Contingency Plan” hits like finding a lost mixtape from a night you barely remember but can’t forget.
Reilly James McGill and Misha Datskovsky started this band in 2018 out of two dead-end projects and a shared need to scream something real.
Their 2021 EP “Complacency” gave them a small break—Pitchfork noticed, and suddenly the name stuck. But life had other plans. Between burnout, financial mess, and personal loss, the dream nearly flatlined. By 2023, with nothing left to lose, they wrote ten songs that sound like they were pulled from the wreckage. “Contingency Plan” isn’t a comeback record—it’s a document of endurance.
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The record’s skeleton is built from frustration and fatigue. McGill calls it “an overture to the rest of the album,” a mirror of financial struggle and the erosion of time, “all underscored with a deep sense of apathetic depression.” He wanted to make something bigger than another self-loathing diary entry. “This album isn’t gonna be about my struggles with self-loathing,” he says, “but something bigger in scope that’s not as easily tackled by just learning to ‘love yourself.’”
The first single, “Persona Non Grata,” dropped on July 3 and carried that rage to the surface. McGill admits he started out wanting to write about the anti-trans panic in the U.S., but after October 7, the focus shifted. “It became more and more clear that the goal was the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people,” he says.
“I just became angrier and angrier. I needed a way to express this anger, as well as the despair and hopelessness.” The song tears into propaganda, government complicity, and political numbness. Datskovsky’s screamed sections draw from political science texts he studied in college, spitting lines like “The number of towers in the Kremlin has grown” and “The land of the hunger is just a dream that’s dead.”
“The Struggler,” released September 10, channels late-2000s post-hardcore chaos into something that burns instead of shines. McGill found the spark after performing a Fall of Troy set for Halloween and falling back in love with the precision and mania of that sound. “After coming up with that opening riff, the rest just came so naturally,” he says. “Throw in a Randy Rhoads-esque guitar solo, take a few cues from My Chemical Romance and Attack Attack—and we got it.” The lyrics dig into addiction and codependency—“a toxic, drug-fueled relationship,” he explains, “where sobering moments of clarity are contrasted with a romanticized view of a love within a downward spiral.”
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Across the album, the tone stays grounded in exhaustion. “Never Play Fair With Strangers, Kid” draws straight from McGill’s own financial spiral: overdrafts, payday loans, and hunger dulled by Adderall. “I’m thankful for the amphetamines in the weeks where I’m too broke to eat,” he sings, half-joking, half-despairing. “Palette Cleanser” deals with death from an atheist’s perspective—his grandmother’s drawn-out passing pushing him to wrestle with belief and the comfort of eternal life. “It’s such a beautiful thing,” he says, “and it was hard to grapple with the possibility that she wouldn’t have that, no matter how thoroughly she believed.”
There’s no false hope here. “Denial, Turned Crisis” turns environmental dread into daily noise. “We Live Such Extravagant Lives, You and I” closes the record with quiet guilt—McGill confronting his own frustration over the band’s stalled trajectory. “I’ve always felt a lot of guilt in not meeting a certain level of success with this band as I wanted,” he says. “I felt like I failed them by not capitalizing on the moment we got some recognition with our previous release.”
“Contingency Plan” feels less like a protest or confession than a grim kind of clarity—a record about what’s left after burnout, grief, and compromise.
Read the full track-by-track commentary from Reilly James McGill below.
Shadow Fight Song:
This song took about a year to fully write. We had the intro and first verse for a little while, but was something we revisited a bunch. I really wanted to capture the same vibe you get from the opening track of Paramore’s Brand New Eyes, Careful, so I took a few queues from them.
The second half of the song was mostly inspired by the opening track of Dance Gavin Dance’s self titled/Death Star album, which definitely played a massive role in the writing of the record as a whole. That double kick section with the screams before Kurt Travis comes in to belt his heart out, all that played a massive role in helping this song come together.
I went back to this song so many times throughout the writing of the rest of the album. Sort of like an overture to the rest of the album, hinting towards at a lot of themes you’d hear throughout the subsequent tracks. Financial struggle, the passage of time, all underscored with a deep sense of apathetic depression I felt myself stuck in.
“Hating myself has gotten old, I’m just worn out and tired,” is a not-so-subtle nod to my favorite Nirvana lyric from Serve the Servants, “Teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old.” It was written in a way to express that this album isn’t gonna be about my struggles with self-loathing, but it’s something bigger in scope that’s not as easily tackled by just learning to “love yourself.”
There’s other nods lyrically as well, from bands ranging from Rise Against to Queensrÿche. I’ve always loved to pay homage to the artists that made me fall in love with music, no matter how different and idiosyncratic they may be.
Never Play Fair With Strangers, Kid
This was another one of those tracks that we had completed half of very quickly, but took months trying to finish. It’s certainly our most straightforward “punk” song, and I think we do a really great job of it.
We always write our songs in the context of album sequencing, and when I came up with this riff, it just seemed like a perfect “second track.” Very reminiscent of Pattern Against User from At the Drive-Ins Relationship of Command.
Again though, it took a while to figure out where to go after that second chorus. I think I just made the decision to keep things simple this time, knowing there’d be a lot of more ambitious arrangements in later songs.
The sample used in the bridge is another nod to Queensrÿche, from their track “Anarchy-X” off their 1988 album Operation: Mindcrime. It fit in real well with the theme of the song, so just said, “fuck it!” And threw it in there. It lined up really well so we kept it!
This song dives into the financial struggle I was dealing with at the time. By the “end of COVID,” I could only find a job that almost a quarter less than I was making before. That couple with inflation, and living expensive, had me so stressed about money that I had a mental breakdown. Constantly relying on payday loan apps to get me by, purpose overdrafting my checking account, and borrowing so much money.- just to scrape by.
The real reprieve I had was the fact that my Adderall would squash my appetite, which inspired the line “And I’m thankful for the amphetamines in the weeks where I’m too broke to eat.” It was a mess.
Persona Non Grata
I came up with that opening riff and kinda thought it was pretty basic, wasn’t too sure how much I’d wanna work on something like that. However, Addison (she was still with us at that time) really saw the potential in it and pushed me to keep at it. From there, we formed the rest of the song. It didn’t come naturally, took a lot of time in between to come up with new parts, that bass line in the 2nd verse being one- full credit to Addison there.
We took inspiration from a couple of different songs to help mold it into what it became. Paramore was in the process of dropping singles for This Is Why, and the song “The News” was my favorite thing they’d put out since Brand New Eyes, so that inspired the song a ton. Of course, Ignorance, also by Paramore, was a big inspiration for the song, as well as One Armed Scissor by At the Drive-In and F.C.P.R.E.M.I.X by The Fall of Troy.
At first, I was initially writing the song to be about the overwhelming doom of the anti-trans environment that was really ramping up in 2022/23. However after October 7th, the response in the wake of the Hamas Attack was insane to witness in real time, and it became the catalyst behind what I wanted the song to be about.
It took a lot, and I mean a lot, of time to craft the lyrics to make sure I was writing a pointed critique of fascist ideology and the jingoism that surrounds it. Misha wrote all the lyrics to his screaming section, and he actually utilized what he had learned in his political science classes. There’s a lot of deep references in his lines. “The number of towers in the Kremlin has grown,” and “The land of the hunger is just a dream that’s dead,” are from these scholarly books he had to read. I could not name them because he has read many, many scholarly books about history and politics.
48 Hours
Another song that was written in sections over the course of a few months. I really leaned into my love for Hail the Sun on this track, and not ashamed to admit it. Traces of Dinosaur, God Hates it When We Think, Falling on Deaf Ears, Body Damage are definitely on display in this track. But that key change in the middle of the song felt so exciting when Misha and I were jamming on it. It’s just a semitone up, but my god did it work.
I can’t really elaborate much on the lyrics here. I’m sorry.
Through the Cracks
I forget what song or band it was, but I was learning a few twinkle emo songs in an open tuning (DADADF#), and I came up with the opening riff on a whim. I pressed record on my phone app and just let it role as I improved the song. It just came to me.
Around the time of writing this song, I really became fascinated with the Hikikomori phenomenon in Japan. There was an interview done with one of them, and it just spoke to me. I related to it so much, but knew that really wasn’t a good thing. So I wrote this song about how I can relate to the solace in solitude, sleeping to escape.
Palette Cleanser
Misha and I rented out a space at our go to rehearsal studio in Philly, Philadelphia Music Studios, and we just started jamming. This song just kinda came out of nowhere and we wrote the whole thing in an afternoon! I wish we could write more songs like that
In late 2023, my grandmother had passed away. The whole experience was so weird to me. It took several days until she finally passed, but the days leading up to it where she was actively dying were not the peaceful experience you expect it to be. Naturally dying has many acts, and they’re not pretty. And that stayed with me for a while.
She was a lifelong catholic, and despite being a “cradle Catholic” myself, I’m atheist in my beliefs. However I couldn’t help but wish I could believe in what she did, because it’s such a beautiful thing. To pass into an eternal life, reunited with everyone you’ve loved who’d passed before you. It’s beautiful. And it was hard to grapple with the possibility that she wouldn’t have that, no matter how thoroughly she believed.
The Struggler
I was doing a Fall of Troy Halloween set with another band I was apart of in 2023, and their song Ex-Creations quickly became my favorite, and really inspired what would become The Struggler.
I was also learning a few guitar solos from Randy Rhodes’ tenure as Ozzy Osborne’s guitarist, and really came to appreciate the artistry behind his playing, so the solo I threw in there is a sort of nod to Randy.
I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of a love based around addiction and drugs. There’s something so romantic yet horrific about it, so that’s where I channeled the subject and lyrics about this song.
Denial, Turned Crisis
Another song Misha and I worked on, and I think we completed in like 2 practices? It took a while to tell Misha the drum idea I had for those verses, but once he got it he locked in
A lot of the lyrics in this song were actually inspired by quotes I’d hear Sam Seder say throughout episodes of The Majority Report. The title of the song for example is definitely something he said.
I just wanted to express the overwhelming dread and doom I feel constantly about the ever worsening climate disaster. Whether through visualizations of disasters or a pointed critique of a system that’s just okay with letting this ongoing crisis get worse, and even actively deny it. Like. How do you live in a world like that?
Heidi’s Song
Heidi was my dog of 14 years who had passed rather unexpectedly in 2023. I loved her so much. The grief of losing her was immense. This was my momento to her, something that will immortalize her even though she’s gone.
I held her paw as she was put to sleep, sobbing my eyes out. She was the goodest girl, and she’ll always live on in my heart.
We Live Such Extravagant Lives, You and I
This song was written rather quickly before we started tracking for the album. The pressure was on, and despite knowing my neurotic tendencies of trying to write the perfect song in the sense of album sequencing, this came out really naturally
I’ve always felt a lot of guilt in not meeting a certain level of success with this band as I wanted, especially for my bandmates. I felt like I failed them by not capitalizing on the moment we got some recognition with our previous release, 2021s Complacency. So a lot of this song dives into that guilt, while also going into the flow of time and the existential crisis it can create
