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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single including a cameo by an American rapper, or a lunge towards mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, among them emphatically stating that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on the audience this evening, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

As the set on her initial individual concert series proves, not every song on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; the show is extended with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that present a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mother: it features a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she declares, she states at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; 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 could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to declare that the original group are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to a record that only came out a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the closing Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom through October 23rd.