The producer/owner of boutique Wellington studio Tiny Triumph Recordings, Toby Lloyd has made a major contribution to Aotearoa’s music scene over the past several years. Not just with the number or quality of artist recordings, but in establishing a new mode of creative support, his studio actively promoting a safe environment for artists. Allied with projects like the Ultimate Music Production Competitions staged during Covid lockdowns, and his Independent Artist Release Guide available through the studio’s website, Lloyd’s commitment to supporting the local industry is apparent. August 2026 sees the release of his own debut album, as soul/folk artist Paper Mountains.  

Towards the end of 2025 producer Toby Lloyd celebrated a notable milestone. “I waited until I turned 40 before I released my first single out into the world,” he laughs.

While mid-life creativity isn’t unusual, what does surprise about this admission is that Lloyd has spent his working life recording music and audio, and is by his own admission an exceptionally productive songwriter. 

As many of the hundreds of Kiwi artists he has worked with through his central Te Whanganui-a-Tara studio Tiny Triumph Recordings will likely attest, song ideas stream from him daily. When clients ask about the tune he’s working on in his head, it’s not unusual for him to offer it for their recording project.  

“Often I pick up the guitar and write a song – it just comes as a form of expression. And you know, there are thousands of songs that I’ve just discarded and never done anything with.”

The client list on the studio’s website numbers close to 200, ranging from the diverse alt pop likes of Danica Bryant to muscular rock acts such as Shepherds Reign, and established national icons including Rob Ruha, Stan Walker and Hollie Smith. Wellington has a wealth of excellent and reputed producers, yet since it was established in 2020 Tiny Triumph Recordings has in short order become one of the capital’s most talked about and highly respected studios. 

Paper Mountains, Lloyd’s newly unwrapped artistic entity, came about when he met his current partner about three years ago, his first marriage having ended in divorce. 

“I hadn’t written a song for a decade or something like that, and I just fell so deeply in love, and she was so inspiring to me, that songs just started flowing out. I think probably because my previous relationship was for 17 years, that that feeling of like, falling in love again, was just so profound. And such a rich emotion, so songs just started pouring out.”

Each having kids from previous marriages meant the situation wasn’t simple, and initial geographic separation played a hand.

“She was living in Masterton, which is like an hour and a half away. I was driving over there frequently and during that time in the car I would often be writing songs in my head, coming up with melody lines and stuff.

“At first it was like, ‘Oh, this is just a great way to express what I’m feeling.’ I had all this energy and didn’t know where to put it, so it was just coming out in the songs. And then, yeah, the relationship progressed.” 

Released at the start of November 2025, Come Home Darling provided a first glimpse into Paper Mountains’ forthcoming debut album ‘An Olive Tree and a Warm Breeze’. The feel good soul/folk single combines vibrant harmonies, horns and driving rhythms, almost all performed (electric and acoustic guitars, slide, drums, bass and vocals) by Lloyd.

“I play everything on that song apart for the horn section, which is done by Chris Buckland and Ben Hunt (from Richter City Rebels) who are go-to Wellington session musicians. And also I got Louis TM to play organ on that song. I play keys on a lot of the album, but for that one I wanted the organ to feel really cool, and Louis was in the studio to play on some other stuff.”

The online artist brief describes the songs as cutting straight to the core of life, loss and love. ‘Imagine if Sam Cooke, Jack Johnson and Iron & Wine had a baby; this is Paper Mountains.’ 

“It really is the idea that a paper mountain is something you can never truly climb,” he explains of the name. “I was trying to do this impossible task of releasing an album, using my own voice, when I don’t feel that I’m a great singer, and never knowing if the music would support the weight of my artistry. Feeling that at any point it could collapse on itself!” 

The album scope was initially intended to be symbolic of undying love, and ‘An Olive Tree and a Warm Breeze’ was originally scheduled for release around the date they’d set to marry. Some songs stem from a period in their relationship when there was friction, times they struggled to work through. Times in which making these songs, he says, helped them both.

“All of it is love songs, but some of it is love songs borne out of the hardest points of our relationship – and my partner’s been really supportive of me completing this. It’s so easy when things are good, for things just to be good, right? And, you know, lots of albums are just love albums, or they’re heartbreak albums… 

“We were fully in love, and everything was amazing. And then things got really, really hard, and it didn’t look like we were going to get through that. Until somehow, miraculously, we did. So there’s that arc in the songs, and I don’t know a lot of albums that have that?”

The emotional arc added complexity to the challenge of track ordering. Choosing to follow the lived chronology meant re-considering the instrumental tone of some already recorded tracks. At one point two finished songs were removed, with a third written to better suit the musical narrative.

“For the more upbeat, ‘everything’s good’ tracks I really wanted to lean into that uplifting summery soul feeling of the horns. In the later part, when things aren’t so good, I wanted to use the cellos [Charlie Davenport] and violins [Alan Molina] to be the character of somber sadness. The important part for me was finding a bridge between those worlds, so I had to carefully construct use of the sonic elements, especially in some tracks where they crossover. 

“At the end of the album, when everything’s healed, we’ve got both playing together and it’s basically an upbeat folk-punk song, like 210bpm, with shredding fiddles and a foot stomping punk rock feel. Punk was my first love, so it’s quite funny to finish the album off in a way that is so representative of who I am and what I listen to – but that came as a surprise!”

He describes the album’s namesake second soul/folk/pop single, An Olive Tree and a Warm Breeze, as one that arrived in a stream of consciousness, after falling head over heels in love. From there his song-building process typically involved adding instrumental and vocal layers on impulse – mostly without a vision of the end result. 

“Very few of the songs had any clear direction, I wanted to operate in a place of pure inspiration and intuition. So it was a lot less planned out than my normal work as producer for others!”

Having worked closely with so many emerging local artists, Lloyd is under no illusions about the marketplace all new music faces. His role means he has numerous industry connections, but more valuably, through the branding of his studio Lloyd has established an active social media presence. 

“I wanted an online abundance of information who I am, what I do, and what I want to achieve – and for that to be easily researched before people reach out to me. Also, I want to work with artists focused on reaching a wide audience themselves.”

Raised in Nelson, he ventured south to attend MAINZ in Christchurch as a teen. Two years later and armed with a diploma in music production and audio engineering, he headed to Wellington, intent on making it as a studio engineer, but struggled to get a start, ending up doing live sound instead.

“Then I moved to England and spent a year there, you know, just knocking on every studio door in the country, trying to find a job! That was at the peak of the global financial crisis. So that didn’t pan out,” he laughs.

Returning to Aotearoa he got a job in Auckland, working for an iOS app business he describes as like an audio book company. In 2011 that role took him to Park Road, Peter Jackson’s world-renowned post production facility in Wellington, where he subsequently stayed for eight years. His CV from that time includes work on massive film projects like Avatar 2 and The Hobbit Trilogy, as well as major local film productions. While employed at Park Road Lloyd began building his own music production cred, recording artists in his ‘spare’ time.

“Film industry work is long hours. During the Hobbit films we’d do 100-hour weeks, like back-to-back. So, during those big films I basically put all of my music production jobs on the shelf. Kiwi films don’t have such big budgets, with them it’s more like 50-hour weeks, so nine to seven every day. Typically I would work until seven, come home, kiss my wife, and then go into my studio and carry on past midnight. 

“Then I’d get up with my kids at six in the morning. So I was living on like five hours sleep. I’d get up, drop them off to kindy, go off to work, and then the next night I would hang out with my partner at the time, and go to sleep early!” 

The resulting burn out was such he ended up with a severe bout of pneumonia that took him close to a year to recover from. He left Park Road in 2018 to focus exclusively on music and strike out on his own, adopting the Tiny Triumph Recordings name – a personal nod to Shihad from when he was a young teen. 

“When I listened to Home Again it felt like that embodied the Kiwi spirit, you know? My uncle my dad, are incredibly modest people, and not kind of people that will blow their own trumpet, and I’d grown up admiring that. I didn’t like people that were big mouthed and showing off. 

“So I like that line, ‘It’s been a day of tiny triumphs’, because I feel like that’s always been like an aspiration, right? You want to succeed, but you don’t want to be this giant blazing ball of fire about it!” He laughs, at closer to candle volume.

Tiny Triumph Recordings provides Lloyd with a suitably broad canvas on which to (almost) exhaust his need for musical creativity, but has developed into something much bigger than that, a boutique recording studio that embraces a holism around the art and artist, as well as the practitioner.

He meditates daily, walks and swims regularly, and runs to work at his recording studio on The Terrace in central Wellington. Conscious of needing to stay healthy in order to sustain a self-employed career, he gave up alcohol to ensure he’d be fresh and alert at the start of each day. Calm is important, as apparently is the sharing of coffee and conversation to warm clients into new studio sessions.

The Features section of his studio website includes an essay Lloyd wrote for medium.com that illustrates his philosophical approach to recording others. It’s titled The Therapy of Music Production and explicitly reveals the intensity of his connection with music. Alongside a business vision to create world-class recording, mixing and production, sits the unique zeitgeist identity of his recording studio as ‘Wellington’s musical safe space, where local musicians come to create music in a supportive and collaborative environment…’ 

It has proven to be a powerful combination, growing demand for his services allowing him to move his studio from home to the ninth floor space previously occupied by Sandbox Studio in late 2024. 

Having completed his first Paper Mountains’ album he has already started on a second, saying he doesn’t want to put this down now – he’s got the bug. For Toby Lloyd music is an obsession and a life force, his active involvement more necessity than choice.