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Harry Styles aside, the solo careers of former members of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – often a pursuit at a toughened-up R&B sound, replete with at least a track featuring a cameo by an American rapper, or a move into mature mainstream-approved polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path thus far followed by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She definitely participates in doing the kind of things that ex-reality TV group artists are known for undertaking, including loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – judging by tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group Confidence Man – but nevertheless, 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 the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and fragmented melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

As the set on her initial individual concert series demonstrates, not every song on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as her debut single: Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that transforms into a musical compilation of nineties club anthems, 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. The song Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with song sections that offer a borderline atonal brand of funk or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She offers Unconditional to her mum: it features a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with metallic pounding beats. IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was strongly inspired by electroclash, while Natural at Disaster begins like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she announces at one point, “shaking like a shitting dog”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are present in large numbers, she proposes thanking them by including a official undergarment to the merch stand.

Future Possibilities

It may well end the way these kind of solo careers end – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a press conference to declare that Little Mix are back – but the fact that every attendee appear knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And even if it does, the closing performance of Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

• Jade plays the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is touring the UK through October 23rd.