Margaret Glaspy @ Night & Day, Manchester, 8 Nov

A show small in scale but bulging with ambition almost beyond its reach, Glaspy's Manchester debut is a thrilling showcase for her past, present and future. An audience in thrall to her exceptional album Emotions and Math has waited the best part of a year to see her play those songs, but she rewards that patience with an accompanying glimpse into where she's come from and where she's going. The former, a collection of covers that embarrass the originals; the latter, a brace of new songs that threaten to outstrip her recorded work.

An attentive and affectionate crowd greets the likes of Lucinda Williams' Fruits of My Labours and Neil Young's Harvest Moon (a delicately executed encore) with warm recognition, but it's her left-field excursions that raise the stakes. Bjork's Who Is It? is barely recognisable, so deftly does Glaspy rework it. A fulsome, brimming confection in its original state, she reduces it to little more than clipped guitar and breathless vocals. But it's a tender, solo reading of Lauryn Hill's Ex-Factor that melts hearts. "You'd hurt yourself to make me stay," she sings and, lost in the moment, she steps back and sighs into the mic. Nobody dares breathe.

Glaspy's excellent touring band (just bass and drums) respect the album's spare arrangements while applying extra welly. But upfront in tonight's loud and clear mix: the voice and the guitar. A gifted and increasingly distinct player, she makes her Telecaster sing. No Matter Who – that bittersweet ode to regret and recovery, and one of 2016's essential love songs – arrives with mandatory swooning. She plays Memory Street and locks into its disorienting, needle-stuck coda ("All the times I, times I, times I... took forever to forget..."). You and I. Parental Guidance. A blistering Situation. The album is revisited with a feasome hunger.

And then there's what lies ahead. Even though you suspect (and hope) Emotions and Math has the legs to support continued touring (and surely Glaspy will return next year to larger venues), there is already new material and it is staggering.

"We got another new song for you. Deal with it." She laughs. No one budges, and one of these new ones (neither have titles as yet) is an epic, bruising advancement of the Glaspy aesthetic. She stomps the overdrive boost and lays into an extended solo like the magical progeny of Tom Verlaine and Kristin Hersh: a devilish mix of precision and abandon. One of the year's most essential new voices is emerging as one of its most compelling and accomplished live acts. This was something. You were there, right?