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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of former members of televised singing competition groups rarely capture the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to certain rules – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track including a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a move into “grownup” mainstream-approved 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 makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken 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, including loudly underlining that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the factory-produced music business – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a handheld cooling device displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from the track Gossip, her collaboration with electronic pair Confidence Man – but regardless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than the norm.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and fragmented melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

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 her debut single: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, driven by precisely the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a cover of Madonna’s Frozen that transforms into a medley of 90s dance hits, from the track Pacific State by 808 State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

More Intriguing Material

But there’s also more where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache melds an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, early 80s syndrums, and powerful guitar riffs combined with clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects 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 piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The artist on stage is a hugely appealing, cheerily unvarnished figure: she declares, she states at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her queer audience members, who are here in force, she proposes showing appreciation by including a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

Future Possibilities

It could conclude the way such individual artistic pursuits end – the enmity towards ex-group member Jesy Nelson expressed in the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are reunited – but the reality that the entire audience seem to be knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that was released just a month ago causes one to ponder. 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 barely recalled interim project.

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