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With the exception of Harry Styles, the solo careers of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands rarely capture the audience's attention. These efforts typically adhere to predictable patterns – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least a track featuring a guest appearance by an US hip-hop artist, or a lunge towards mature Radio 2-friendly smooth pop-rock territory – and they usually amount to a dimly remembered placeholder, the sight and sound of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

A Unique Journey

It’s a state of affairs that makes the idiosyncratic path currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above engaging in the typical activities that former talent show band members are wont to do, among them emphatically stating that she’s no longer subject the media-trained constraints of the manufactured pop industry – judging by the audience this evening, the top-selling product on the official goods stand is a fan displaying the phrase “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a lyric from Gossip, her collaboration with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the songs she has chosen to create is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She launched her individual career with last year’s superb Angel Of My Dreams, a deeply odd, jolting and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, noisy synthesisers and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance on her first solo tour demonstrates, not everything 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 insanely catchy, but it’s also typical dancefloor-oriented pop, powered by exactly the Motown musical snippet the name implies; the show is extended with a interpretation of Madonna’s Frozen that devolves 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 material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache combines an Abba-esque chorus with verses that offer a nearly discordant brand of funk or are enfolded by deep reverberation. She dedicates the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs combined with clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl unexpectedly reanimates the sound of early 00s electroclash, 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 artist on stage is a immensely likable, cheerily unvarnished presence: she declares, she states at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; shouting out her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she proposes thanking them by adding a branded jockstrap to the merchandise booth.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the way such individual artistic pursuits typically finish – the enmity towards former bandmate Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster resolved, a media announcement to announce that the original group are back – but the reality that every attendee seem to be knowing every lyric as they join in vocally to a record that was released just a few weeks prior causes one to ponder. And should it occur, the closing Angel Of My Dreams emphasizes that Thirlwall’s solo career is unlikely to recede into the realms of the barely recalled interim project.

• Jade performs at the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester tonight and is traveling across the United Kingdom through October 23rd.