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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track including a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in 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 media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and fragmented melange of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance on her first solo tour 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 insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs combined with metallic pounding beats. IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she announces at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are here in force, she suggests showing appreciation by including a official undergarment to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits end – the hostility towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson expressed in 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 knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the final performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade performs at the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester this evening and is touring the UK until 23 October.