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Harry Styles aside, 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, replete with at least one single including a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” mainstream-approved smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members 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 the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and fragmented mixture of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her first solo tour demonstrates, not every song on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample its title suggests; the show is extended with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

More Intriguing Material

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that present a nearly discordant brand of funk or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she announces at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, 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 way these kind of solo careers end – the enmity towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to announce that the original group are reunited – but the reality that every attendee appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to a record that was released just a month ago makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is not destined to fade into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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