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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the public imagination. They usually follow predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. 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 tonight’s crowd, the most popular item 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 musical partnership with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than the norm.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not every song on her debut album her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as that: Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by exactly the Motown musical snippet the name implies; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that transforms into a medley of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a fabulous melody, early 80s syndrums, and crashing rock guitar allied to clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound 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 begins like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished presence: she is, she announces at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she suggests thanking them by adding a official undergarment to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It could conclude the way these kind of solo careers end – the hostility towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to announce that Little Mix are back – but the fact that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they sing along to a record that was released just a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And even if it does, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade plays the Manchester venue O2 Victoria Warehouse in the city of Manchester this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.