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Harry Styles aside, 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 – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a move into “grownup” Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, among them emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – judging by tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with 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 music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and disjointed melange of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance on her initial individual concert series proves, not every song on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by exactly the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced 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 figure: she declares, she states at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she suggests thanking them by adding a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It could conclude the manner such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity 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 back – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to an album that only came out a month ago causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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