The annual BBC Sound Of poll was unusually prescient this year. The winner, retro-soulman Sam Smith, has been a sales sensation, George Ezra’s debut topped the UK album chart and Ella Eyre’s coiled-spring performances are filling rooms on her first headlining tour. Of the three, it’s Eyre who most captures the eye and ear: the 20-year-old Londoner is a Venn diagram of Scary Spice and Mary J Blige, powering through this show on a wave of brashness and arresting, soulful passion. Her confidence is betokened by the stage backdrop, a lion’s head topped with a crown: hear her roar.

She has said her aim is to “hit people in the face with my music rather than tickle them”, and she’s as good as her word. Eyre doesn’t do downtempo: her forthcoming album contains only one ballad, and it receives short shrift tonight. A couple of verses into it, she abruptly switches to a slowed-down cover of Jermaine Stewart’s We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off. But there’s hardly time to digest her gender-flipping reworking of it – in her hands, the line “I’m not a piece of meat, stimulate my brain” is venomous rather than whiny – before she surges into the pounding drum’n’bass track If I Go.

It’s not surprising that the audience is predominantly young women, known as – sigh – Eyreheads. Eyre has an aspirational swagger, turning a lacey catsuit into a uniform for taking on the world. She also has an adolescent’s way of exaggerating every emotion, which is deeply compelling: on Deeper she’s all roaring anguish at not being able to return a boyfriend’s love; Bullet for You shows her as a grim, deep-voiced hitwoman. And she has the star quality to transform her No 1 hit with Rudimental, Waiting All Night, from faceless banger into a personalised account of frustration. The thunderous applause that follows tells its own story.

• 13 October. Box office: 0117-927 9227. Venue: O2 Academy, Bristol. Then touring.