Yet again, the singles chart is almost aggressively uneventful, and this week the album chart has chosen to join it. There really is a dearth of new material breaking through this spring.

1. Harry Styles – “As It Was”

Three weeks. It’s peaked, but it’s still comfortably ahead of the competition. “First Class” by Jack Harlow is stuck at number 2 (and to be fair, that is a new hit), and the rest of the top 10 consists entirely of tracks shuffling a place up or down. The only significant activity in the top 20 is the highest new entry…

18. Lauren Spencer-Smith – “Flowers”

This is the follow-up to her self-released single “Fingers Crossed”, which reached number 4 in January. Unsurprisingly, she is now signed (to Island). It’s a slightly repetitive ballad, and unrelated to any of the various earlier hits of the same name, but it might have a chance by standing out as something different.

There is precisely one other new entry on this week’s chart…

38. Tyga & Doja Cat – “Freaky Deaky”

Well, that was a lot better than I expected, particularly with a title like that. The video… certainly commits.

It’s the lead single from Tyga’s next album. He hasn’t had a top 40 hit since 2018, when “Taste” got to number 5 – a string of singles and guest appearances since then have landed in the lower reaches of the top 75. Doja Cat has had the better track record of late, though her previous single “Get Into It (Yuh)” also stalled just outside the top 40. This one has struggled to get momentum too – it’s been climbing up from the lower reaches for eight weeks now.

Suzanne Vega has a co-writer’s credit on this, on the grounds that the chorus has basically the same melody as “Tom’s Diner”, best known in the UK in the form of the DNA remix which reached number 2 in 1990.

Surprisingly, the original a capella version was released as a single and does have a video. (It reached number 58 in the UK. MTV seem to have also hacked it as a makeshift video for the remix, which is strangely effective.)

This week’s climbers:

• “Bam Bam” by Camila Cabello featuring Ed Sheeran climbs 9-8.
• “She’s All I Wanna Be” by Tate McRae climbs 17-14.
• “Crazy What Love Can Do” by David Guetta, Becky Hill & Ella Henderson climbs 20-17 in its second week.
• “Light Switch” by Charlie Puth climbs 26-25
• “Birthday Cake” by Dylan Conrique climbs 36-30, which is this week’s biggest climber. At 30.
• “Melody” by Sigala climbs 34-31 (beating its previous peak of 33).

The two singles dropping out of the top 40 are:

• “Boyfriend” by Dove Cameron, which gets hit by the downweighting rule in its tenth week out. It peaked at number 9.
• “The Joker & The Queen” by Ed Sheeran, which entered at number 2 and managed nine weeks in the top 40 – actually pretty lightweight by his standards.

On the album chart:

1. Digga D – “Noughty By Nature”

His third album (or mixtape) to chart, and the first to reach number one. Its predecessor, last year’s “Made in the Pyrex”, got to 3, so this isn’t hugely surprisingly. It includes the top 10 hit “Pump 101”.

And there’s nothing else going on in the albums top 30.

32. The Police – “Greatest Hits”

This reached number 10 on release in 1992. Apparently it’s here because of a 30th anniversary vinyl reissue. For a greatest hits album.

33. Kurt Vile – “(Watch My Moves)”

That’s his lowest placing solo album since 2013 – he normally places in the mid 20s, and this is a quiet week too. All the stranger considering that his band War on Drugs had a top 10 album last November. In case you were wondering, his name isn’t a reference to the German composer – he really is called Kurt Vile.