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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a move into mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in 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 media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not everything on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as her debut single: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet the name implies; things are padded out with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with song sections that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it features a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster begins like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she announces at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she suggests showing appreciation by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the hostility towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to declare that the original group are reunited – but the fact that every attendee seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to an album that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade performs at the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester this evening and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.