Local band Pancho evolves from Gonzaga band to scene staple

Tackling academics at Gonzaga University while quickly becoming a staple of the Spokane scene may seem challenging, but local band Pancho has pulled it off.

While growing up in Seattle, Henry Seward’s non-musical parents didn’t want to pass down such a trait and had their children pick up an instrument. Seward picked guitar while his sister chose piano.

“At first I did not really like it, because my parents forced me to do it,” Seward said half-jokingly. “After a while, once I started playing songs I really liked, I started to really love it.”

By his early teens, Seward was writing his own music and joined high school jazz band. Seward’s passion for music was growing, but he couldn’t find anybody looking to expand upon it with a band.

Going into his freshman year at Gonzaga University, the electrical engineering student hoped to finally find a group of people just as excited to play music together. Seward didn’t wait long.

Soon after moving into the dorms, Seward visited a high school friend whose roommate, Rowan Smith, happened to play guitar. Smith’s neighbor Sam Twitty heard the two jamming and joined on bass. This left the group in need of a drummer, so they sent out a request on a Gonzaga-only Snapchat story and found Aiden Medeiros as a result. Keyboardist Jesse Jordan would also join the group of college students.

Less than two months into the school year, Pancho was founded.

“I was wanting to go to college and have people to jam with and be in a band with,” Seward said. “They were the same exact way.”

Roughly six months into their existence, Pancho’s first single, “Laser Eyes,” was released in April 2024. Less than a year later, their debut full-length album, “In Circles,” was released in March 2025. Thanks to seamless group chemistry and the fact that Seward and Smith already had songs in need of polishing, the process was relatively easy.

“When we met, we immediately got to cleaning those up and writing more music,” Seward said. “So it all came pretty quick.”

The group’s wide array of influences range from Bob Dylan and Oasis to Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, leading to an alternative rock sound somewhat difficult to nail down.

“I’d like to just be straight up rock and roll, if that was acceptable for a term,” Seward said. “I think we’re still semi-trying to fit where we’re at, but just kind of making stuff that we like.”

As songwriters and musicians, Seward and the band don’t get too caught up in genres or even the deeper meaning behind lyrics while putting pen to paper. In referencing an interview he saw with Paul McCartney, who shares a similar creative process, Pancho often purely focuses on what they think sounds good and roll from there.

“We’d think like, ‘What does that lyric mean?,’ but we’ll figure that out later. And then we never figured that out,” Seward said. “I just related to that, I mean now it sounds like we’re saying we’re like the Beatles, but we’re not like that at all.”

Nearly three years into being a college band, Pancho has the system figured out. Sometimes schedules don’t always align and random tests get in the way, but the group has set practice times during the week and has grown disciplined to planning everything else around them.

The band has performed consistently over this time frame, from house and garage shows to venues like ZOLA and the Chameleon while their next show will take them to Northern Idaho’s Schweitzer Mountain Northwest Winefest on Saturday. Whether headlining or opening, Pancho has become a common name on show posters across the Inland Northwest.

“It’s just cool to be considered that we’re in the scene,” Seward said. “It’s super cool to meet these amazing artists and people that are just so heavily inspired and into music. Yeah, it’s just an honor to be considered part of a music scene in a town like Spokane.”

Although Twitty and Medeiros have both graduated, they will be in Spokane for the time being, meaning at least another year of Pancho is on the horizon. They have been testing out a number of songs while performing, slowly but surely refining each tune as they look to record an EP or another album over the coming months.

“We’re really pumped about our music, it’s really awesome to see where it’s going,” Seward said. “It’s insanely hard to make music, at least for me, that I feel like I like … now it feels like we’re making stuff that I feel really proud of.”