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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, including loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject 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 handheld cooling device displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

As the set on her initial individual concert series proves, not every song on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as her debut single: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; things are padded out with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that present a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. 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 unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic figure: she declares, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she suggests showing appreciation by including a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the way these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to declare that the original group are back – but the fact that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that only came out a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

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