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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least one single including a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into mature Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

This common scenario that renders the unconventional route thus far followed by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, including loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – judging by the audience this evening, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and disjointed melange of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not every song on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She offers the track Unconditional to her mother: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with metallic pounding beats. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster begins like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, delightfully authentic figure: she declares, she states at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes showing appreciation by including a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner these kind of solo careers end – the enmity towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are back – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.