Composition
Rankin wrote the song before Alvvays was formed. The song came at a period in which she had moved from Halifax, where she was attending school, to Prince Edward Island, and waitressed at a pub to make ends meet. She wrote the song at a rural farmhouse she lived in with O'Hanley for a year. The town had gone through its worst snowstorm in thirty years, and the home was engulfed in 6 ft (1.8 m) of snow. She remembered: "We had a snowmobile to get to the road, but we ended up burying the snowmobile. I guess we were inspired by it being so bleak". In an interview, Rankin detailed the track as "an open assessment on the idea of marriage." It criticizes the standard expectation to marry when one reaches adulthood. Rankin at this period was in her mid-twenties and observed that while many of her friends were engaged to be married, she was not and pursuing a different path. She went into detail about this expectation: "We watch a lot of people 'grow up' and get mortgages and have big dumb weddings In society it's sort of looked at as 'The Next Level'." She hoped to profile untypical types of love in the song, such as the dangerous type of partnership embodied by the criminal couple Bonnie and Clyde. The character Archie is fictitious. Rankin took the name for the character from Archie Rankin, her geologist/musician cousin formerly of the band Mardeen. "He's a very burly, curly-haired, super Scottish fisherman type. I think he was very perplexed about it," Rankin admitted. Some journalists took the title as a reference to Archie Comics, which Rankin confirmed was untrue.
Throughout the song, Rankin yearns for this partner's commitment. Each refrain begins with Rankin shouting "Hey" twice, before crooning the title. She paints a portrait of a lover burdened by financial pressure and unwilling to consider marriage: "You've expressed explicitly your contempt for matrimony / You've student loans to pay and will not risk the alimony." These lyrics have been interpreted as a reference to the increasing cost of student loan debt in North America at the time of the song's release. Rankin implores her beau to disregard his worries, and a proper ceremony, and simply unionize legally: "So honey take me by the hand and we can sign some papers / Forget the invitations, floral arrangements, and bread makers." Pitchfork writer Stuart Berman interpreted these verses as " less like she's fighting for the love of her life than checking items off a list." In an interview, she described the song as "Just two kids without any direction, doing it on a whim in a courthouse, saying 'Who cares?' to everyone else who has all of their ducks in a row before settling down. It was the most romantic thing I could think of at the time." Mike Katzif of NPR interpreted Rankin's point of view as confrontation of her own "conflicting motives and outside expectations." Its lyrics have been considered tongue-in-cheek, while its subject matter has been characterized as melancholy or bittersweet.