A Seattle-based music nonprofit, Sonic Guild Seattle, is giving $10,000 grants to 10 local musicians as they head into the new year, distributing funds directly to artists.
This year’s cohort of grantees is diverse in style and identity. Seattle’s flare for alternative pop/rock is well-represented, with grants going to garage band Acapulco Lips, post-modern beach rock band Warren Dunes, punkers Zookraught, dreampop groups Coral Grief and Sea Lemon, Puerto Rican-born rocker Emi Pop, and Mandopop group, Chinese American Bear.
The 2025 grantee cohort also showed the region’s folksier side, with singer-songwriters Kate Dinsmore, indie-folk cellist and NPR Tiny Desk finalist Ollella, and South Seattle rapper and musician Gabriel Teodros also receiving $10,000 awards.
Run by local music scene stalwart Ben London, Sonic Guild Seattle was established to support Seattle musicians and the regional music community during the pandemic, and has directly distributed over $650,000 in grants and direct payments to musicians since the organization began. Sonic Guild also has chapters in Denver, Colorado and Austin, Texas that do similar work in their communities.
“This year alone we saw more than six hundred nominations [for the Artist Grant], record attendance at events, and a continued surge of new bands, new records, and new audiences,” London said in a press release.
The announcement of this year’s grant recipients comes at a time when costs for artists, venues, and audiences are rising regionally and nationally. Still, London and Sonic Guild Seattle Marketing Director K. Van Petten lauded the post-pandemic recovery and growth they’ve seen in Seattle's music industry over the last five years. This year Sonic Guild Seattle also grew, allowing them to establish two new grant lines providing production and touring support to musicians.
“Since 2020, Seattle has been in a surge of creativity on a scale I have never seen, and our funding has to catch up to the flood of new music coming out of this city. You can feel this renaissance in our DIY venues, in our sold-out local shows, in the way artists show up for one another, and in the albums and tours being built from the ground up,” Van Petten said.
London acknowledged the work other Seattle-based music institutions have also played into the music scene’s post-pandemic comeback by fostering up-and-coming artists, creating performance opportunities, and forming “a clear pathway for musicians to grow their careers here in the Northwest.”
Those institutions include mainstays like Sub Pop, KEXP, The Vera Project and MoPop, as well as newer organizations like The Residency and the Seattle Jazz Fellowship, which offer a variety of programs to uplift regional artists in hip-hop and jazz, respectively.
“Sonic Guild is proud to be part of that pipeline and to support the artists who are shaping the next chapter of Seattle’s musical story,” London said.
On Feb. 21 at The Triple Door, Sonic Guild Seattle will hold a celebration for the class of 2025 grantees featuring grant acceptances and live performances from prior grant winners. Sonic Guild Seattle members attend for free, and a limited number of public tickets are available on the Triple Door website.
