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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture the public imagination. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, replete with at least a track including a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a barely recalled interim project, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

This common scenario that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, among them emphatically stating that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the manufactured pop industry – based on tonight’s crowd, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her collaboration 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.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and disjointed mixture of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her initial individual concert series proves, not everything on her first full-length release her album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is quite as interesting as her debut single: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Motown musical snippet its title suggests; things are padded out with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms 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

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that present a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She offers the track Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to clanging industrial drums. IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while the track Natural at Disaster starts out like a piano ballad before unexpectedly swerving into a dark computerized noise.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she suggests showing appreciation by adding a branded jockstrap to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards ex-group member her previous colleague Jesy Nelson voiced within Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that the original group are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the final Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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