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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them emphatically stating that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and fragmented melange 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 first solo tour proves, not everything on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation 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 Abba-esque chorus with song sections that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she declares, she announces at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that the original group are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to a record that was released just a month ago 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 dimly remembered placeholder.

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