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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – 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 typically become a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

A Unique Journey

This common scenario that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s 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 free from the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – based on the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.

A Superb Debut

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and fragmented mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

As the set on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not everything on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as her debut single: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, driven by exactly the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; things are padded out with a interpretation of the Madonna classic 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

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She offers Unconditional to her mother: it has a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar allied to metallic pounding beats. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or more accurately the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she states at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are present in large numbers, she suggests thanking them by including a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to announce that the original group are reunited – but the fact that every attendee appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a month ago 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 domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.