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With the exception of Harry Styles, individual artistic journeys of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow predictable patterns – often a pursuit at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track 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 sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years prior to the unavoidable reunion tour.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route currently taken by former Little Mix member Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She definitely participates in engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them emphatically stating that she's free from the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – based on the audience this evening, the most popular item on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo the group 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 the previous year's excellent Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jarring and disjointed melange of grand emotional pop songs, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her first solo tour 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 insanely catchy, but it's equally typical dancefloor-oriented pop, powered by precisely the Supremes sample the name implies; things are padded out with a interpretation of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a medley of nineties club anthems, from 808’s Pacific State to Set You Free by N-Trance.

Additional Fascinating Content

But there’s also more 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 surrounded with cavernous echo. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mother: it has a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or rather the exciting variation of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while the track Natural at Disaster begins like a piano ballad before suddenly shifting into a dark computerized noise.

An Appealing Presence

The artist on stage is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished figure: she is, she states at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; giving a shoutout to her queer audience members, who are here in force, she suggests thanking them by including a official undergarment 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 the song Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to declare that Little Mix are back – but the reality 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 final Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the domain of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester this evening and is touring the UK through October 23rd.