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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in engaging in the typical activities that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from 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.

An Impressive First Single

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

During the performance on her first solo tour demonstrates, not every song on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of nineties club anthems, 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 song sections that offer a nearly discordant brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mother: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she states at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers end – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to announce that the original group are back – but the fact that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to a record that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.