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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single including a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, 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 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 emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – based on 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 Gossip, her musical partnership with electronic pair 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, jolting and fragmented melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts 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 equally fascinating as her debut single: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet the name implies; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a musical compilation of nineties club anthems, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. The song Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic figure: she is, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she suggests thanking them by including a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the way these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to announce that Little Mix are reunited – but the fact that every attendee appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to an album that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the domain of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester tonight and is touring the UK until 23 October.