James frontman Tim Booth says the band are releasing two mini-albums instead of a full record partially to cater for the shorter attention spans of music consumers in the digital age.

The indie veterans release their first mini-album, 'The Night Before', on Monday (April 19th) and will follow this up with 'The Morning After' later this year.

Explaining their reasoning behind the dual release, Booth told the BBC: “We live in an age of iTunes where people don't seem to be listening to albums any more. Attention spans are getting shorter.”

Booth continued that despite the short length of the records, the band have been prolific in the number of songs they've churned out.

“We wrote 120 songs,” he added. “Normally we can only fit one or two slow pieces on an album without bringing it down too much. This time we said, let's do a whole mini album of slow pieces.

“We are going in a room next week for five days and improvising and recording a more mellow album. It's a bit scary. I haven't written any lyrics and I've got five days in which to come up with them.”

(by Scott Colothan)