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Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups seldom grip 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 American rapper, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone gamely killing time before the inevitable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that ex-reality TV group artists are wont to do, including loudly underlining that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – judging by the audience this evening, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb 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.

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 that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; things are padded out with a interpretation of Madonna’s 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.

More Intriguing Material

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of early 00s electroclash, or rather the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she states at one point, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she suggests showing appreciation by adding a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson expressed in the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to announce that the original group are back – but the fact that the entire audience seem to be word-perfect as they join in vocally to an album that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is not destined to fade into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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