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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least one single including a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into mature 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 makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed 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 – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and fragmented 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 proves, not everything on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by exactly the Supremes sample its title suggests; the show is extended with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

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 offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she announces at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she proposes thanking them by adding a official undergarment to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are reunited – but the fact that every attendee seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to a record that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the final 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 Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is touring the UK until 23 October.