Jade Thirlwall Review: Pop's Most Unique Star Rises Above TV-Created Past

Harry Styles aside, individual artistic journeys of ex-participants of TV talent show-manufactured bands seldom grip the public imagination. They usually follow certain rules – either an attempt at a more edgy urban music style, complete with at least one single featuring a guest appearance 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 visual and auditory experience of someone enthusiastically passing the years before the inevitable band comeback concerts.

An Idiosyncratic Path

It’s a state of affairs that renders the unconventional route currently taken by Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall surprisingly refreshing. She’s certainly not above doing the kind of things that former talent show band members are known for undertaking, including loudly underlining that she's free from the press-managed restrictions of the factory-produced music business – based on tonight’s crowd, the top-selling product on the merchandise stall is a handheld cooling device emblazoned with the legend “TINA SAYS YOU’RE A CUNT”, a song line from the track Gossip, her musical partnership with dance duo Confidence Man – but nevertheless, the music she’s opted to make is pop music with a far more fascinating style than usual.

An Impressive First Single

She opened her solo account with the previous year's excellent her debut single Angel Of My Dreams, a highly unusual, jolting and disjointed melange of big pop balladry, loud electronic instruments and audio excerpts from the classic track Puppet On A String by Sandie Shaw.

During the performance 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: the track Before You Break My Heart is extremely memorable, but it’s also standard-issue disco pop, driven by precisely the Supremes sample its title suggests; the show is extended with a cover of the Madonna classic Frozen that devolves into a medley of 90s dance hits, from 808’s Pacific State to N-Trance’s Set You Free.

Additional Fascinating Content

However, there exists additional material in the vein of Angel Of My Dreams. Headache combines an catchy refrain reminiscent of Abba with verses that offer a borderline atonal style of rhythmic music or are surrounded with deep reverberation. She offers the track Unconditional to her mum: it has a wonderful tune, eighties-style electronic percussion, and powerful guitar riffs allied to clanging industrial drums. The song IT Girl surprisingly resurrects the musical aesthetic of 2000s electronic punk movement, or more accurately the exciting variation of early 00s pop that was strongly inspired by the electroclash genre, while 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 announces at a certain moment, “trembling uncontrollably”; giving a shoutout to her LGBTQ+ fanbase, who are here in force, she proposes showing appreciation by adding a official undergarment to the merch stand.

What Lies Ahead

It could conclude the way these kind of solo careers typically finish – the enmity towards former bandmate her previous colleague Jesy Nelson expressed in Natural at Disaster patched up, a press conference to declare that Little Mix are reunited – but the reality that every attendee appear knowing every lyric as they sing along to a record that only came out a few weeks prior makes you wonder. And should it occur, the closing Angel Of My Dreams underlines that Jade's individual musical path is unlikely to recede into the realms of the dimly remembered placeholder.

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