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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of ex-participants of televised singing competition groups seldom grip the audience's attention. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a toughened-up R&B sound, complete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an American rapper, or a lunge towards “grownup” Radio 2-friendly polished adult contemporary – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, 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 currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall oddly invigorating. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, among them loudly underlining 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 dance duo Confidence Man – but regardless, 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 disjointed mixture of grand emotional pop songs, loud electronic instruments and samples from Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String.

During the performance on her first solo tour proves, not every song on her debut album That’s Showbiz, Baby! is equally fascinating as that: the track Before You Break My Heart is insanely catchy, but it's equally standard-issue disco pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet the name implies; things are padded out with a cover of Madonna’s 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

However, there exists additional where Angel Of My Dreams came from. The song Headache melds an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that present a nearly discordant brand of funk or are enfolded by cavernous echo. She dedicates Unconditional to her mother: it features a fabulous melody, eighties-style electronic percussion, and crashing rock guitar combined with metallic pounding beats. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the thrilling strain of millennium-era popular music that was heavily influenced by the electroclash genre, while Natural at Disaster begins like a keyboard-led emotional song before suddenly shifting into a malevolent electronic grind.

A Charming Performer

The woman at its centre is a hugely appealing, delightfully authentic presence: she declares, she states at a certain moment, “shaking like a shitting dog”; 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 may well end the manner these kind of solo careers typically finish – the hostility towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson voiced within the song Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to declare that the original group are reunited – but the fact that the entire audience seem to be knowing every lyric as they sing along to an album that was released just a month ago 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 traveling across the United Kingdom until 23 October.