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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least one single featuring a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into “grownup” mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

A Unique Journey

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a fan emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair the group Confidence Man – but regardless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and disjointed mixture of big pop balladry, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her initial individual concert series proves, not every song on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, driven by exactly 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 nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She offers Unconditional to her mother: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or rather the thrilling strain of early 00s pop that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished presence: she declares, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are here in force, she suggests showing appreciation by adding a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to declare that the original group are reunited – but the reality that every attendee seem to be knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a month ago causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

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