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With the exception of Harry Styles, individual artistic journeys of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an US hip-hop artist, or a move into mature mainstream-approved smooth pop-rock territory – and they typically become a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, including emphatically stating that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop of a noticeably more intriguing stripe than usual.

A Superb Debut

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jarring and disjointed mixture of big pop balladry, loud electronic instruments 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 quite as interesting as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Supremes sample the name implies; the show is extended with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves into a medley of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

More Intriguing Material

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that present a borderline atonal brand of funk or are surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it features a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs allied to metallic pounding beats. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was strongly inspired by electroclash, 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 states at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes showing appreciation by including a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It may well end the manner such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to declare that the original group are reunited – but the fact that every attendee seem to be knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And should it occur, the final Angel Of My Dreams underlines 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 this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.