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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single including a cameo by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone gamely killing time before the inevitable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that renders the unconventional route thus far followed 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 known for undertaking, including loudly underlining 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 official goods stand is a handheld cooling device displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with last year’s superb her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and fragmented melange of big pop balladry, loud electronic instruments and samples 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 that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by exactly the Supremes sample its title suggests; things are padded out with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a medley of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar combined with clanging industrial drums. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation 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 woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she states at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are here in force, she proposes thanking them by including a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the manner such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the fact that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to an album that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. 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 dimly remembered placeholder.

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